A Sweet Unrest

Contrast Podcast - My Parents Music

This week the Contrast Podcast theme is My Parents Music and despite all the good music I grew up listening to, I felt a burning desire to go completely camp and play Cher.  My mother really does have pretty good taste in music and she exposed me to a lot of different things.  Yes, we had every Cher recording and yes, there was an awful lot of 70s light rock in there and yes, OK, geez, I admit it, I did know all the lyrics to Donna Summer's Bad Girls, the entire album (it came with a lyric sheet!) not just the song, well before it was age appropriate.  And though I'm sure it's terribly uncool to say it, it was all kind of fun.

But mixed with all the froth and fluff were some real gems.  Like this one.  My mom is not religious at all but she loves this, and I think it's the spirit of hope in sorrow (of which she's had plenty) and faith in better times to come that speaks to her in something like this. Or that's what speaks to me, anyway.  

I believe the sun and moon

Will shine up in the sky

When the day is grey

I know it's clouds passing by

I think this is utterly lovely.

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra featuring Mahalia Jackson - Come Sunday

Forehead

I first read this a few months ago, and it's taken me a while to decide whether or not I like it.  And I've decided that while there are a couple bits I don't like, I do like it very much overall.

It's longer than what I usually post here, but hopefully worth it.

Forehead by David Rivard

I love you

I know as much as anything

for your courage

so companionably invisible

as it is

that it passes mostly

as simple

good sense.  I don't mean you're

practical at all- god forbid-

only persistent

as far as dying brothers and cold calls

are concerned- not violent,

not weak, but like a lantern afloat on a wave

open if necessary

to sinking your light

offshore.  Onshore

I am as you would know

strongly sometimes

impatient & inside a swarm of loud thoughts

self-absorbed & locked-up.

If you were to die

who would remove me

from those thoughts?

When you lean your forehead

against mine

what you hear inside there

are all those 

sounds likely, vibrations

like windowpanes rattled by headland squalls

or bullet trains

late forever & loaded down

with passengers green

as hoodie-wearing witches,

I lean my forehead against

your forehead

gently knowing both 

will shortly vanish.

"First of all," says Virgil, "find

a protected place

for the bees

to make their

honey, a place that's 

safe from wind." 

I think I need to lighten up because the thing that originally bothered me about this, and he does this in other poems I've read, is the use of '&' instead of 'and'.  What's that about?

  

Now that I like it, I don't know why it took me so long to come around.  I remember the 'dying brothers and cold calls' line felt too specific, like it shut me out rather than bringing me in, but I don't feel that way about it now.  The part that kept me coming back was 'like a lantern afloat on a wave/open if necessary/to sinking your light/offshore.'   I thought that was a lovely image and a wonderful way to think about courage and I think the whole thing is very beautiful and vulnerable and tender.

But what do you think?

I found this in the July/August issue of The American Poetry Review and as far as I know it hasn't been published in a book, but Rivard's two most recent collections are Sugartown and Bewitched Playground.