Back and forth they sway,
Those bamboo slender stalks.
O how they sway and shiver
As they press against a breeze
Before they yield it back!
And how they tip and tilt,
As if the roots they sank
Deep into the ground
Were danseuses' upraised toes.
Thus back and forth they go,
Still upholding their erect pose.
O how subtly they lean,
And how gently they rock,
Full of grace and nestling worth!
Beneath a darkly deepened sky,
Into silence's paradox
Comes Hypnos, leaving ajar
How from lyric lilt and lull
So many serene and deeper voices,
Hushed by daylight,
Are born and rise to plead
On behalf of stillness
Which souls still carry within.
While sudden women clothe
Their ears, wrists, and limbs
In added strings and streams,
Bearing weights of pageantic gold,
As though they thought Eros
Were of another sun.
O those lilies of the night,
Bloom-piercing through the dark,
Why, that is satin's severed sheen
Upon such shoulders and such arms.
They bring to riot and to joust
Marble shaped in flowing white,
To sight and touch as living flame
That speaks in ancient tongues.
And that marvel's molten wax
Lands its sting and casts its charm
With its polished, bruising brush.
In those shoulders, those bared arms,
Love and night discover their lamp,
Like a rhyme that gives shape to sound.
A piano in the attic —
what or whom
does it attend
if unplayed, untouched?
Yet do not many of us
carry just as much silence,
long accumulating,
and just as long unsung?
Yet there is always more —
not merely the instrument,
unused and left behind,
but also the music —
And the musician,
just as gone,
or perhaps more so,
if lost
to her own self-forgetting,
to amassed and accrued non-use,
whose coat upon a life
is what ringing is to death,
hyphened into sleep —
where only ghosts
come dropping by.
And what are melodies to souls
but varied depths and portions
of lives they themselves once lived,
and thus recovered memories?
Which, in music's classic art,
possess precision and discipline,
and which, among the Romantics,
yield to cantos of the heart.
And all this somehow
goes in Czech under the name
vážná hudba —
serious music, verbatim,
or music with a weight:
a music that attends
to the source
beauty placed within,
that living gold with a mirror
so that it may search its face.
In a word:
music with a weight,
ever serious and ever sincere,
the one and only weight
that always strives skyward.
Tell me: are desire and heart one,
Or does the one, ablaze,
Snub and snuff the other?
With a gesture or a darting smile,
With amicable ease in brushing by,
Women don a state of swift undress,
Yet displayed taut
In crisp,
Effortless dispatch:
Would he be my grape,
Deft and ripe,
Prone to detonate a sun?
Thus one wonders:
Does the spark
Compose desire or love,
Or is it desire that causes light,
Making it pen and pin
Where a heart has grown an eye,
Meant to be so lit and struck,
In a state of its own undress,
That it makes the victim see
What the loveless passes blind?
