Études from Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances op. 46

“Only what is human can be truly foreign” – Wislawa Symborska

Movement 6 - D major - Allegretto scherzando (Sousedská)
Outsized hands:
Baby fingers on a viola de gamba—
People walk with prescribed gait along a boulevard
Past the blue homes of the poor
To the feathered and beaded, skin-filled bazaars,
Full with the cool of negotiation,
As people gain life from haggling, and obstinance in asking,
But all they are selling is what makes one long for
The country of one’s own dreams.

How quickly romance turns to war
When the children of the tribe
Are asked to dance.

The plaints are all of whether
Some would-be lover would ever care,
Not whether they would ever know.
Dreams leave dreamers aside, love abandons lovers,
The heart hardens around a belief
While the infinite has no voice.

Why can’t this street, in Austria or Prague, exist as it is
Without percussive swell or forest of strings,
Without the need to grow
Beyond the stone decayed foundation,
Accepting only all the light it holds inside?

Pyramids ever modulating
In a vacuum of dust.

Love’s needle threads
Spiderwebs of meaning
To nest in possibilities
And trace out implications—
The results glisten, their strength
Is their lack of solidity, their beauty
Their transparency,
Water droplets on the way down.

Movement 7 - C minor - Allegro assai (Skočná)
The politics of conducting
The readers of Poulenc
With those of Dostoevsky,
The restoration instrumentalists
With indeterminate interpreters,
The loom-attuned river dwellers
With the uptown crystal merchants—
Comes down to a central beat
They look to as at butterflies waving
Unpredictable wings through familiar meadows.
Then the fatherly hand
Letting all devotion, in a cataclysm of bliss,
Come flooding through a ligeated sieve
Like sun through a lace curtain.

Powerless syllables from a chrysalis of fear
But the soul is a butterfly in time,
Its wings invisible but clear, giving off
An all-encompassing pulse, an anxious wind,
That whips up hosannas of silence.

If one can slow oneself enough to live
Outside of time, one may see
That perfection is encased in movement,
At the delicate combination
Of rush and lassitude,
Everything merges then collapses
From forms worn and duties outdone
And picks up anew like a flower
Blooming just as watching eyes alight
On dancing branches—

Torn up crazy trees
Dare, with long faces,
A short answer…

Movement 8 - G minor - Presto (Furiant)
The orchestra can feel.
It can express the effort of flowing.
It can breathe without appearing to inhale.
Tongues and lips reduce love to its widest formulations
While hands and fingers try to keep time with the heart
As they ride tides of fife peaks and trombone valleys
Knowing what the city people say
Without needing to know their words
That would only keep the warbling soloist
From flying into the cushion of clouds.

Lovers turn to abstract shapes,
The dances to mathematics.
The drum eggs on the young to what the dead know.
The sky molds to whatever the baton conjures.

Like receptors DNA, sense creates the mind
That always lies, with soft alibis,
But the mind can be free, of the emotions it protects,
The connecting machine can be untangled,
As the heart that cannot speak can speak,
And the body that cannot be still
Can learn to rest.

The notes are fractions away from each other
Pulled from the same stone
But send me universes away.

Covered people, wisps in the wind of implacable earth,
Stare at bare trees, recognize their own
Lone stands and knotted idiosyncracies
Locked by invisible roots underneath,
But exposed up above, for the sun and the birds to see.
The winter fixes them to a kind of stone,
A thing of fact rather than embroidery, of cause
Instead of effect, redemption and not curse.
Music, like paintings, grow out of the earth.

Orpheus with a heart as big as the night
Created, in grief and desire for sacrifice
Music to overpower the strongest gods
But he could not believe his lyre of desire
Had any power to persuade,
Even as he saw it raise the dead to life with his own eyes.
He tricked himself that he had tricked God with his grief,
As he’d tricked music from the strings,
As if his grief did not have worth
And his sacrifice could not compel his love to follow.

I’m still afraid,
Hallelujah.
I have seen myself erased in the eyes of thousands.

Seeded by stars, I am proof of heaven
As I draw what is only waiting shape.
What is there to know
As the wind merges and wanes
Except what I create
Out of imprisoned voices
Seeing eagles dancing.