Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Ulli Sir Jesse’

Big Picture

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 27, 2022| 13 Comments »




On a rocky white outcrop,
Ulli and I stand in silence
at the edge of the canyon,
held by layers that range
from the Permian to the Cretaceous,
and Ulli begins to sing
a song we sang twenty years ago
and, from the strata of memory,
I unearth the German lyric,
excavate the harmony,
and we join our voices
to the structuring of time,
just one more arrangement
of temporal events
added to the linear record
since the singularity.
And the sound waves tremble
in the sensitive membrane drum
between the middle ear
and the cochlea—
a song of connection,
a song of fading light,
a song that somehow
has origins in the Ichthyostega
that crawled from the sea,
the development of Broca’s area
in the left frontal lobe of the brain,
the mountaineers who would sing
to each other across the Alps at dusk,
and this wonderful woman who
brought these words and this tune from Europe
and taught them to me in Colorado
so that decades later
we might stand side by side on this cliff
and know ourselves lucky—
after all that has happened—
lucky to find ourselves in the same remote place
singing the same familiar song,
the molecules a spiraling ricochet of praise,
our song itself part of the matter
that makes the world,
part of a pattern that is ever overlapping.
Is it any wonder
I cried?

Read Full Post »

By Example

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 6, 2021| 3 Comments »


for Ulli, Happy Birthday!


I love harmony, she says as she claps
and laughs and settles in her chair
in the sun. And I think of all the times
we have sung, have sung in harmony—
in stairwells and forests, on stages
and in living rooms, standing
in the current of the Gunnison River
and sitting on the back stoop of the farm,
our voices soaring on different paths together—
like two notes holding hands as they move
together through time.
I have come to trust her voice below
as I sing in some interval above.
I have come to trust what voices do
is a metaphor for love. I have come
to trust that dissonance can always
be resolved. I have come to trust
that harmony is the soundtrack of the soul.
And so we sing. We sing again—
sing in the sun, in the rain.
And though we sing of loss, though we sing
of great change, though we sing
of goodbyes and breaking chains,
the harmony offers its beauty to everything,
and so in this uncertain world
she finds and shares harmony
and we sing and we sing and we sing.

Read Full Post »

Following Her Lead

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 8, 2012| 4 Comments »

for Ulli Sir Jesse

Surrounded with falling,
you choose joy.

Given a minor tune,
you change a note

and the melody, now major,
finds new gaps

in the day’s dark staves.
Given a lump, you dissolve it

with tears. In the face of loss,
you smile and offer your hand.

In the hail, you sing. In the dark,
you sing. And all along the trail,

you sing and invite the world
to sing with you. I will sing

with you. Though I weep,
I will sing with you. Though

you move father away, I sing
with you, I sing with you

wherever you go, I sing
because that is what we do,

we who know harmony
as one of the ladders

to god, we who feel how
the song sings us, and because

you have taught us
so beautifully, we sing,

though it sounds perhaps
more like gurgling tonight,

more like keening, or wailing,
we sing, gonna rise up, we sing.

Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: