Friday, dark but not wet. Warmish, balmy, by winter standards. Friday is the popular dude, he brings the weekend in his wake. Normally swaggering and confident, this Friday feels less certain of himself. After a string of holidays and shortened weeks, does the weekend still bring the same strong positive reaction it normally does to the workaday crowd? Well, I'm sure glad it's here, if that counts.
Not that it has been a bad or especially difficult week, it hasn't. But it has been a week filled with things that took a great deal of concentration, which is draining in its own way. So a couple days largely unplugged sounds wonderful. Friday is still popular with me and I am glad to be a part of his in-crowd.
This morning's commute playlist was a perfect example of the raison d'être for this blog. An eclectic blend of tunes and styles that flowed from one tune to the next as if written to do so. I doff my cap to the little iPod algorithm DJ that conjures these random shuffles up for me.
Anyone who knows me well knows I am a big fan of Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. So much of his prodigious body of work is as much poetry as it is music, if not more so. This morning's example is just that. The song is Lily of the Midnight Sky and the lyrics are wonderful:
Over the slow slide of continents
Over the salt pans pipelines masts and pavilions
Shimmering crescent moon recedes into working dawn --
Lone crow against pallid sky
Single plume of white smoke on yellow speckled plain
Yellowing leaves sparkle in cold breeze --
Wave patterns among wave patterns
Particles disperse and rejoin
Dissolve and reform like the lining of a womb
Still
The cold of your absence blows from
The silent TV, the parking lot
The balcony with clothes waving good-bye/hello
In the rising day
You keep fading away
Don't I know that you're always around
I can reach you if I try
Lily of the midnight sky
Solders of sunrise -- shooting into a forest of flowers
Slow motion
Petals float into pink crimson white
Grow wings
Flutter into mountainous distance
Flutter like a stadium full of applauding hands
I raise a fist to the marauding sun that has hidden you away
I'm the rag in a bottle of gasoline
Longing to ignite
Ich will alles
All of you -- shining on the panther skin of night
Mirrored in a black lake in a night that glistens like blood on gold
Nobody else could be you
If only I could see you
I should be able to touch you somehow
I can reach you if I try
Lily of the midnight sky
While you look from on high
Spare a smile as I
Put on my dog mask and howl for you
I can reach you if I try
Lily of the midnight sky
I could pick many favorite lines from a poem/lyric like this, but this bit really strikes me (taking it out of stanza format): "Still, the cold of your absence blows from the silent TV, the parking lot, the balcony with clothes waving good-bye/hello." Can't you just feel that loneliness, see that blank TV screen, the parking lot at night, the empty balcony?
I takes me back to the Russian Far East where, by the second or third week of a work-related trip there, I felt as far away from home and family as I ever have. When I read that lyric I am back in a crooked Russian apartment, looking over a crumbling parking lot and seeing the drying laundry hanging out of the many windows and small balconies of hundreds of identical concrete apartments, and feeling a long way from home. It is September, the weather has just changed and the first chill of the coming winter is now in the wind. A wind that carries a mix of smells that are not the smells of home. Smoke from huge forest fires to the north of the city, Russian and Korean cooking smells, the smell of decaying concrete, diesel and exhaust, and the herbal woodsy smell of the surrounding birch-centric woods (those that aren't burning).
Good writing, poetry, lyrics can take me places, bring me back to places. This is a good, though sometimes jarring, power.
The full playlist:
- Bruce Cockburn: Lily of the Midnight Sky
- Don Byron: Frasquita Serenade
- Frank Sinatra: You Make Me Feel So Young
- Fleet Foxes: White Winter Hymnal
- Philip Aaberg: Prelude In F Minor (Bach)
Posted via Hermes.
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