Psalm 50

God shines from the perfection of beauty

God calls the earth, and the earth calls back, responding with its own abundance of beauty

Deep calls unto deep, beauty calls unto beauty

Beauty is worship.




God knows all the fowls of the mountains, the beasts of a thousand hills.

The beasts and fowl glorify God through their lives, by fulfilling the measure of their creation, not by sacrifice.

God doesn't need gifts--sing for him with your life, as the birds do instinctively.

Beauty is worship.

Top 10 MESSIAEN

To celebrate Olivier Messiaen's 101st birthday today, here are 10 of my favorite Messiaen works, generously supplied by Youtube:

1. Quartet for the End of Time (1941)



2. Catalogue d'Oiseaux (1958)



3. Des Canyons aux Etoiles... (1974)



4. Saint Francois d'Assisse (1984)



5. Turangalila Symphony (1948)



6. Vingt Regards: 20 Contemplations of the Christ Child (1944)



7. Chronochromie (1960)



8. Livre d'Orgue (1952)



9. Eclairs sur l'au dela (1992)



10. Harawi: Song of Love and Death (1945)

Citric Acid

What arguments of pain can withstand

The mere sight of a lemon-tree in the afternoon

Which represents, I've been told,

The love (towards whom, I was not informed)

Of the Virgin Mary? Why

This should be so, I do not know,

Though at times I have felt love flood

The mouth with a gill-gilding tartness,

And I remember me the hard yellow love

Buzzing between unripe virgins--

Lemons were also known to

Cancel poison ingested

From eating off ornate

Silver platters.

Farewell

The wharf quails a shaggy fist
At the sea's salt-searing whips,
Which tear at the shores,
Lick and lave the leewardings,
As seashells fill up with blood,
And the cormorants' cry
Pierces the leaden air,
Cleaves a line and bites it deep
So the edges burr--
Engrave this knowledge--
The heart's flesh shines like copper,
And song is torn by sea's hands,
Thrown into scaly spittle on the waves,
But still discerned in discrete golden drops.

Never Break That West Wind

The sky went unrecognized all that morning
And through the afternoon
It was not until evening, the glorious gloaming
That began to slip in under the door,
And to gradually fill the room,
Cyclopean stars opening their eyes
One by one took their places on the loveseat
But I would not open my eyes
I would not look upon that sky
It's intrusion was a profanity to me
And so I let out a long, pleading, yet luxuriant fart
Like the wandering violin line that opens Beethoven's Op. 131,
Solid and lasting, like the art in museums,
And the stars sat politely, pretending not to hear it.

Sestina

The saw's plucking teeth
Bite into a juicy red-
Wood, with tufts of fur
Clinging to it's weave
And hearts like sharp feathers
Slicing a stiff salt wind

Around my fingers I wind
The slick floss, between my teeth
Tiepolo clouds painted with feathers
And behind my molar a sudden spark of red
Before dawn I weave
Moss with your fur

A delicious mink's fur
Which round your waist winds
Near your neck it weaves
With a gentian between it's teeth
Violet and red
As a cardinal's dropped feather

At the notch of the arrow, the feather
Makes fly the fur
And snow blooms red
Button's stuck--we can't rewind
So we take the tape in our teeth
And shiny black weave

In time to drums, dancers weave
Arms bathed in keys of feather
Necklaces rattle of badger teeth
Bordered with fur
Spatterings of woodwind
The bansuri spewing red

Still sunk in the red
Unpicking last night's weaving
Into a sphere the yarn winds
Oars feathered
The walls must be furred
Prepared for the comb's teeth

At the stitch of the tooth, an underglow of red
Fistfuls of fur into a shawl woven
And a heart pierced with feathers, left flapping in the wind.

Salt Song

Turning and turning in the radiance
Of cormorants' screams,
Driftwood flesh is bathed,
Salt stings my lips.
I dream of the resonance of the rivers of your hair,
And I stand on the strand
And speak your name to myself,
Before the wind can wrest it from me.
I press wood into my skin
And my eyes make salt
But it is not enough.
Your waters erase my footsteps.
Your kelp shines a net round my liver.
I crave the scrape of your faded fingers.

Speech's Intaglio

No, let me speak--I've sifted the lights from your hair,
Spread your rye with the stars' jelly,
Shucked the ghosts that seal your eyes' wax
And cast the husks upon the cirrus--
Still that marl-eyed rag-toothed ermine
Quick as a sub-pleural fire-stream runs
Roiling through the burrows of my body,
And when your voice comes to me over the sea
As the copper of morning is bitten
By sunlight's nitric acid,
Wings of your breath
Bevel the edges of the air,
Grating flakes of padparadscha
Which glint upon the fires of your froth.

Aubade

We smeared our faces with dirt as it began to grow dark.
Reaching a great plain overgrown with broken herms,
Between which spread beautiful rataplanning raspberries,
We pierced our bastions and our apses full.
We sat down upon the storm and began to observe--
I saw a large sandwich of bread and chicken,
She said that she felt a large glass of milk between her fingers;
I felt a bed grow by my side, and there was another beside her.
When we awoke the cornets were high in the heavens,
The knit wood was beautiful in the summer morning,
And the finches were weaving the branches.
Our beds were of the finest flax stitched with leaves and moss.
At first we were filled with wonder.
'But I am still dreaming,' said Lisa.

Tectonics

From a thousand miles under the ground I tread
You come rolling towards me, you
Who have been approaching for millennia,
You at last sense your birth is near, only a few decades away--
You, eyeless, whose feminine features
Resemble those of the young Mozart,
Though of basalt carved;
My feet feel you walk beneath me--
Sometimes our soles are nearly touching.
When your birthday dawns
You will at last arise to greet me
And eye to eye, brow to brow,
Mouth to mouth, thigh to thigh,
I will dissolve in your igneous.