Six Poems by Perry Thompson

HOTEL DU CENTRAL

St. Severin tolls on the corner.
Thieves huddle by its gates.
Monsters perch on its eaves.
Across Rue St. Jacques you bathe
in the cold water flat
saying how Paris wastes our days.

We linger in the sidewalk bar,
use callous words.
You’ve grown restless
in the market on the boulevard.
You tap your ashes in coffee cups.

Peculiar maps, peculiar times.
Tickets in a foreign tongue
lie heavy in your clothes.
Go then. Be a tramp in Italy
or tanned and laughing in Greece.

The city turns cold.
And Paris, thief of thieves,
comes in the loud
night to steal the last
strength in my legs.

OK, I’m tired.
Take what you will.

MAPS HAVE NO TEARS TO CRY

Lands struggle to stay afloat
Grasping for each other.
Twisted faces, agonized,

Change shape only in eons.
Within grotesqueries
Neighbor abhors neighbor.

Black lines
Carve the maps.
Maps carve the world.

TIDES

Hoary gods in service to the moon
Spill their marrowed tears on shelled

Sands, bone longings of our white days.
Electric strings of eye, and ear harrowed

White with spectral winds or breezes
Tinged iodine in their anger, fierce and

Filled to the brim with lurid nerve,
Pull at the hem of our legendary hearts.

IN MAGNETIC BLOOD

Magnetic blood.

Where liquids swell to mythical
height.
Shoulder blades break from flesh, bare as wings in rawboned
sun.
Secret muscles expand.

From pole to pole the earth sings in lean darkness.
The compass flexes.
Ice and fire rush through veins. Stars beat like hearts.

Genetic codes click on winds past Olympia.

Under sunny skies the Word is made new.
The Mathematical Rose
whirrs in its clean language while the temperatures of atoms quicken.

Mythic creature — you and I
(two cruel Michelangelos) pass judgement here on the human form.

The Worm and the tides — in their fusion feel the swell,
the swell of hot

magnetic blood.

OLD MARKETPLACE OF ROUEN

lambent flames
fold ‘round the girl

who does not
scream. dawn’s

cello bows a bleak
sonata as ash rises.

Rouen holds black
bones. what once

beauteous, now
vile in the sky.

mark on all who see,
pitch on ashen souls.

dust for loins, legs
gone to black sticks,

eyes boiled to bone
stare, the girl who

wanted more than lace
& pretty shoes to wear.

IN GRAVITY’S THOUSAND ARMS

Slaves of the tide and its skyward house
we march in bones from one beginning.

Wars between the man and woman rage
like suns in the throat of some hot God.

Gardens fashioned with words in the world
tell the summertime of perfect Eve.

Bless the wheel driven from Paradise,
all the beasts making peace with Adam.

But gravity tugs at the blood
curving at the speed of light.

If the world has a ladder
it is the act of loving.

About A Dissimulation of Birds

Cover of A Dissimulation of Birds

The wellspring of musical inspiration sprung from birdlore is well represented in the musical realm. From Daquin’s  “The Cuckoo” to Messiaen’s monumental “Catalog of the Birds”, to the second movement of Bartok’s third piano concerto, the image of birds and often the “bird calls” themselves have served as the musical material for many composer’s palettes.  This fascination is certainly justified. On a direct level, birds are, by nature, perhaps the world’s most musical creatures, with songs both unique and richly diverse. This has led many a composer to transcribe to paper, as accurately as possible, these bird songs, and to present them, in conjunction with his imagination and sense of order, as a musical offering.

I set about writing these pieces for piano based not upon the musical sounds of the birds themselves, but rather on the names bestowed upon them found in the Book of Saint Albans and the Egerton Manuscript. These ancient “hunting” terms, coined by the gentry, express a colorful and poetic sensibility of the habits, characteristics, and “personalities” of the birds. Although other animal groups are represented in these ancient texts, it was the bird groupings that caught my eye (and ear) with their anthropomorphic magic.

A Few Observations

A Host of Sparrows

Sweeping across the winter dusk, arcing majestically into the setting sun. Snow drops silently from a fir branch. The sparrows sweep palindromically back across the frozen sky.

A Chattering of Choughs

A twittering and nervous conversation, seemingly erratic to everyone but them.

An Ostentation of Peacocks

The peacocks, clothed in their finery, strut about in pompous display. This showy spectacle begins to disintegrate and fall apart. It ends, as vanity often does, in a grotesque caricature of itself.

A Watch of Nightingales

A distant bell tolls the onset of darkness. The vigilant nightingales watch and protect throughout the night until the first light of dawn.

A Party of Jays

The foolhardy and mischievous jays band together. Snippets of song cascade into one another as the revelers sing and dance throughout the night.

An Exalting of Larks

An image seen from afar, silent, as if in slow motion.

Before Breathlessly Melting Into Air

The poet borrows from the composer, and the composer from the poet. In music, meter, from the Greek word for “measure” is the framework for rhythm determined by the number of beats and their accents; in other words, the pulse. Rhythm is the composer’s interpretation and expression, the written matter; the notes within the specified meter. And it is the poet’s language, the words themselves that forge their own rhythmic life. Thus, we have the close alliance between music and poetry.

“Before Breathlessly Melting into Air” was composed in March and April of the year 2002, and the underlying concept and structure of the work is derived from this idea of the parallelisms between music and poetry.  The work uses the four basic metrical “feet” or rhythms found in poetry, IAMB, DACTYL, TROCHEE, and ANAPEST. These rhythms (pulses) are used for the basic rhythmic materials for each of the four movements of this work, as well as, poetically, for the titles of each movement, which combined give us the title for the whole composition. It was commissioned by, is dedicated to, and premiered by the pianist and composer Duncan J. MacMillan.

The first movement (“Before”), uses the poetic pulse, IAMB, the basic pulse of all poetry. The iambic, or “heartbeat” rhythm, short-long, is one of the most natural and elemental rhythms known to man. Once established, the pulse can stop, be rendered to silence, and still be felt. Such is the power of this ancient pulse. The composer has taken license with the Greek “IAMB” in this work, making this the beginning of the piece, the statement “I am”, with the ensuing heartbeat rhythm throughout the movement. The harmonic scheme for the entire work is also based on “real and human elements”, a row, or series of tones, each one representing a letter of the alphabet. In this piece the row spells the name of the performer, and the one to whom the composition is dedicated, Duncan J. MacMillan; thus the tones C, F, Bb, B, A, Bb, Gb, A, A, B, A, F, Ab, Ab, A, Bb. This harmonic framework runs throughout and gives the work its musical language.

The second movement (“Breathlessly”), the DACTYL, is one of the two basic three syllable beats (feet) in poetry.  DACTYL (the Greek word for finger) has the pulse long-short-short; corresponding to the human finger, with one long joint followed by two shorter ones.  In a musical sense, this movement of the work demands a complex dexterous technique in an unrelenting rhythmic framework.

The third movement  (“Melting”), based on the TROCHEE pulse, long-short, is the counterpart to the IAMB.  This rather dark movement, musically, is a depiction, literally, of this pulse throughout.  It is in the form of a Passacaglia, the recurring ground bass motif being the “Duncan J. MacMillan” row.

The final movement of this work, “into Air”, (ANAPEST), short-short-long, is the corresponding three syllable pulse to the DACTYL. “Anapest” in the Greek means “reversed”. This final movement is in many ways “reversed”. With the exception of a slower middle section over a basso ostinato, the mood is rather joyous and uplifting; the rhythm is reckless and uninhibited. This is in contrast to the more somber and “careful” nature of the first three movements. A short codetta accentuating a rising motion in fourths brings the work to a close, not with a crashing, pounding conclusion, but rather one that dissipates “into air”.