Bill Evans - Like Someone in Love

Cento- -from the poems of Mary Oliver and Dorianne Laux

FOR EARTHWEAL..... The Nature of Enchantment

all summer
weeds and blossoms shimmering
rose and fell back replete and beautiful
and i touching the blue and silky air
listen with happiness
i think there is no other prize
only gleaming rapture
you love someone dark
electric sweet open  wild

seeking each other out
then they meet and swoon
sometimes the air
comes undone over our heads
and washes down around our ears
like rain
it has to be love 

 

 

 

THE RAPTURE

Mary Oliver

All summer
I wandered the fields
that were thickening
every morning,

every rainfall,
with weeds and blossoms,
with the long loops
of the shimmering, and the extravagant—

                   

 pale as flames as they rose and fell back,
replete and beautiful—
that was all there was—

and I too
once or twice, at least,
felt myself rising,
my boots

touching suddenly the tops of the weeds,
the blue and silky air—
listen,
passion did it,

                    addled me,

                    stripped me clean
                    then covered me with the cloth of happiness—

I think
there is no other prize,
only rapture the gleaming
rapture the illogical the weightless—

whether it be for the perfect shapeliness
of something you love—
like an old German song—
or of someone—

or the dark floss of the earth itself,
heavy and electric,
At the edge of sweet sanity open
such wild, blind wings.

 

THE ORGAMS OF ORGANISMS

Dorianne Laux

Above the lawn the wild beetles mate
and mate, skew their tough wings
and join. They light in our hair,
on our arms. And below us, in the grass,
the bugs are seeking each other out,

 antennae lifted and trembling, tiny legs
scuttling, then the infinitesimal
ah’s of their meeting, the awkward job
of their turnings around. O end to end
they meet again and swoon as only bugs can.
This is why, sometimes, the grass feels electric
under our feet, each blade quivering, and why
the air comes undone over our heads
and washes down around our ears like rain.
But it has to be spring, and you have to be
in love — acutely, painfully, achingly in love —
to hear the black-robed choir of their sighs.

from Smoke (2000)