the bright song of sex or hunger,

[dahlia_moon]

"Practising Bach"
Jan Zwicky

for performance with Bach's E Major
Partita for Solo Violin, BMV 1006

Prelude

There is, said Pythagoras, a sound
the planet makes: a kind of music
just outside of our hearing, the proportion
and the resonance of things — not
the clang of theory or the wuthering
of human speech, not even
the bright song of sex or hunger, but
the unrung ringing that
supports them all.

The wife, no warning, dead
when you come home. Ducats
on the fishheads that you salvaged
from the rubbish heap. Is the cosmos
laughing at us? No. It's saying
improvise. Everywhere you look
there's beauty, and it's rimed
with death. If you find injustice
you'll find humans, and this means
that if you listen, you'll find love.
The substance of the world is light,
is water: here, clear
even when it's dying; even when the dying
seems unbearable, it runs.