1. |
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You set out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself loose me.
Nearby is the country we call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
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2. |
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Who will you cry to, heart?
More and more lonely, your path
through incomprehensible mankind.
And all the more fruitless perhaps
for keeping its direction,
just keeping on toward the future,
towards what has been lost.
Once, what was a fallen berry of jubilation unripe.
But now the whole tree is breaking
in the storm, my slow tree of joy.
My slow tree of joy.
My slow tree of joy.
The loveliest in my invisible landscape,
you who made me more known to the invisible angels.
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3. |
Sonnet to Orpheus I, 25
06:14
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But you, who I had loved like a flower whose
name
I didn't know, you who so easy were taken away:
I will once more call upon your image and show it to them,
my beautiful companion of the unsubduable cry.
The dancer whose body filled with your hesitant fate,
pausing, as though your young flesh had been cast in bronze;
grieving and listening--. And then, from the high dominions,
unearthly music fell into your altered heart.
Again and again interrupted by downfall and darkness,
earthly, it gleamed. Till, after a terrible pounding,
it entered the inconsolable open door.
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4. |
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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? And even if one pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
endure, And we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only
saints have listened; until the gigantic call lifted them
off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and did not notice at all:
so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure
His voice--far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind
and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,
I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,
knowing about you...
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars
took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating
higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?...
But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we
breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment
our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume...
O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:
new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart...
alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the angels really
reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves, or
sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace
of our essence in it as well?
If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil
between river and rock. For our own heart always exceeds
us, as theirs did. And we can no longer follow it, gazing
into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies
where, measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death. Look, I am living... Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
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5. |
A Tree Ascended There
07:00
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When I paint your portrait, nothing happens.
But I choose to feel you.
Yet standing here, peering out,
I am all the time seen by you.
All creation holds its breath, listening within me,
because, to hear you, I keep silent.
And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,
a shelter nailed up out of your darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind--
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.
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6. |
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I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly around your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you.
Don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision, as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.
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7. |
Fragments from Orchards
05:00
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Tonight my heart makes sing,
the angels who are remembering...
A voice, that's close to mine,
lured by too much silence,
rises and decides never to return;
intrepid and tender
Our life goes on strangely suspended
between the faraway bow
and the stab of an arrow,
between a world that hesitates
to seize the angel and She
whose powerful hand prevents it.
I've said my goodbyes.
Countless departures have gradually honed me.
But I return, begin again,
which sets my attention free.
All I can do is fill my gaze.
All I can do, without holding back,
is feel the joy of having loved what reminds me
of all the losses that move us.
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8. |
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9. |
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Be ahead of all parting, as though they were
behind you, like the winter that's just passed, before.
For among winters there will be one so relentlessly winter
that only in wintering through will your heart be readied to last.
Rise there singing and praising to
realize the harmony in your strings.
Here, among pale shades, within a fading world,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rings.
Be--but nonetheless know why nothingness is
the unending source of your most fervent vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your full affirmation.
To the full reserve of Natures used-up,
cast off, speechless creatures--
an unsayble amount--
jubilantly join yourself and cancel the count.
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Devin Patten Toronto, Ontario
Toronto based bassist/composer; active sideman who's worked with artists such as AHI, Juno award winning Allison Au, Order of Canada's Terry Clark, among others; and leads the chamber jazz ensemble the Afton Project
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