Erie serenade

A comment by lowfatmuffin—about meditating to music outside in the darkness—stirred up one of my favourite musical experiences.

It goes back a few years, before I was married I think, so we're talking 15 years. I was visiting my parents, but they had gone to bed. I took my portable CD player out on the patio and sat in a lounge chair listening to Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music. It was a warm, windy August night, sultry in a way that is peculiar to the Lake Erie shore in summer, with waves crashing on the beach below. A full moon trailed a restless silver highway across the water.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Becomes the touches of sweet harmony.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold....

I let myself be washed away in Shakespeare's words, the lush music, and that torrid, shimmering night.

Two poems on separation

Posted for mylastsigh.


Fallen angels

Our wings fall away like ages
and we are left human
with stone feet
and eyes no longer through skylights
but turned unto day
still greening across the sod.

January 16, 1996


From a one-bedroom apartment window

Flakes fly through a beam by the street corner.
A few naked crystals
caught in the act of falling,
pink beneath mercury vapour.
Their motion sudden, harried
lost from a world
of others drifting unseen in darkness.

Based on a poem written January 23, 1996.


I moved into my own apartment on January 20, 1996.