November for Beginners - Rita Dove

Snow would be the easy
way out— that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won’t give.

So we wait, breeding
mood, making music
of decline. We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind,
with your cargo of zithers!

November 1981

MacArthur Park

MacArthur Park: End of a love affair? Deeply symbolic? One hit too many?
by Miguel Muelle on Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 11:26pm



I first heard this song around 1973, and thought it must be very profound, because I had no idea what it was actually saying. My English teacher had me write a paper about it and I have no idea what I wrote, but I got to know the words very well. I still had no idea what he was saying.

The fact that Richard Harris was singing was already interesting, but that he was emoting about a cake and a recipe, and, "Oh No!!!" was even more curious. The music is very appealing and complex, apparently modulating up in ways that I was not used to, certainly not in the early 70s.

So tonight I thought of the song, looked up the words and remembered my fascination with this little bit of, perhaps, emperors' new clothing. Hearing it again, I like it even more than years ago. It is really great music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKRLnTcF61k

-------------

Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance
Between the parted pages and were pressed
In love's hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers by the trees

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it'
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

There will be another song for me
For I will sing it
There will be another dream for me
Someone will bring it
I will drink the wine while it is warm
And never let you catch me looking at the sun
And after all the loves of my life
After all the loves of my life
You'll still be the one

I will take my life into my hands and I will use it
I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it
I will have the things that I desire
And my passion flow like rivers through the sky
And after all the loves of my life
After all the loves of my life
I'll be thinking of you
And wondering why

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it'
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no! Oh, no
No, no
Oh no!!

Rise of the Masters

Who would have thought Apple iTunes would be selling the latest in the new breed of more thoughtful war computer games, RISE OF THE MASTERS. In this game you choose between being in Mozart's Great Masses or Salieri's Symphonic Stealers, and take part in bouts of hand-to-hand musical melees: "Intervals of Death", "Triads & Triads Again", "Scales of Injustice", and "Improvise or Die", among many others. There are occasional hidden traps as well. The worst of these is the "Clementi's Mechanicus", where both warring sides have to survive being pelted by hidden snipers firing too many notes.

Overall this is a very encouraging sign that the gaming industry "gets" the new generation, that they understand that today's gamers want more than just mindless blood and guts. They long for discipline and order, harmony and structure, sturm und drang. They yearn for light in their darkness, for a little night music, as it were. And if this title proves as successful as I predict, it won't be long before we see the sequel to RISE OF THE MASTERS, THE DAWN GIOVANI.

You who never arrived - Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets
that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps
the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...



Rilke has a way of doing with words what I strive to do in design: To say the most with the least and most appropriate. His poems have a clean line and no extraneous drop-shadows or gimmicks to make them seem like more than they are. When I read lines like, "Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished.", I know the thought intimately from wondering the streets of Madrid as a tenager looking for "her".

(She) who never arrived, for me could not ever actually arrive, because her very being (and perhaps tragic attraction) was defined by unrequitedness...

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost & A. E. Housman

Springtime poems from these 2 wordpainters born in Spring:

"A Prayer in Spring" by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

*****

from "A Shropshire Lad", by A. E. Housman:

II

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

"I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith."

Sonnet 43 (from Sonnets from the Portuguese) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

---

Greater minds than mine have applied themselves to disecting this precious poem. I place it here because on this, Valentine's Day, people everywhere are employing poetry for the purposes of expressing what they cannot — from a sugary valentine candy that says "I'm Yours" to a schmaltzy card, loaded with sugar and heavy cream. But when I read EBB's words, they are so — lucid — that it almost boggles the mind that this has become a poem about passionate love.

Rabindranath Tagore on Love and Beauty, Art and Design

"Love gives beauty to everything it touches. Not greed and utility; they produce offices, but not dwelling houses. To be able to love material things, to clothe them with tender grace, and yet not be attached to them, this is a great service. Providence expects that we should make this world our own, and not live in it as though it were a rented tenement. We can only make it our own through some service, and that service is to lend it love and beauty from our soul. Your own experience shows you the difference between the beautiful, the tender, the hospitable, and the mechanically neat and monotonously useful."

I have been thinking a lot about what I do for a living versus what I do with the gifts given to me by God. Out of the soul of Tagore comes a very beautiful and profound illustration, not only of the difference (as I see it) between Art and commercial art, but of the overlaps and extensions of each into each other's space (which of course are not bound by lines at all!).