 Janáček's String Quartet No. 2 "Intimate Letters," as performed by the Emerson String Quartet. It's emotional rise, peak, and disintegration is uniquely achieved among music. He described the work as "my first composition which sprang from directly experienced feeling," its urgency as "a great longing - and as if it were fulfilled."
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Two experiences that influenced the creation of Birdsong: standing upon the extreme edge at Dover, rain-drenched, sea-lashed; walking the springtime streets of Washington after a storm, thousands of trees in bloom raining heavy petals, puddles filled with color, air filled with scent, sun shimmering.
We were too weak because we were too strong - the height of the cliff, the loss of love. If you want to leap, I will come along - the surrender to love, the fulfillment of all identity. Bring miraculous cliffs to the ground! "Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." - Pascal  Your fragile body rests
In my hands The tumbling precipice I lay myself in your smallness . . . The next single from the Nature EP will be Birdsong.
Says Carl Sandburg in Haze: Keep a red heart of memories Under the great gray rain sheds of the sky, Under the open sun and the yellow gloaming embers. Remember all paydays of lilacs and songbirds; All starlights of cool memories on storm paths . . . My love is a yellow hammer spinning circles in Ohio, Indiana. My love is a redbird shooting flights in straight lines in Kentucky and Tennessee. My love is an early robin flaming an ember of copper on her shoulders in March and April. My love is a graybird living in the eaves of a Michigan house all winter. Why is my love always a crying thing of wings? On the Indiana dunes, in the Mississippi marshes, I have asked: Is it only a fishbone on the beach? Is it only a dog's jaw or a horse's skull whitening in the sun? Is the red heart of man only ashes? . . . Why do the prairie roses answer every summer? Why do the changing repeating rains come back out of the salt sea wind-blown? Why do the stars keep their tracks? Why do the cradles of the sky rock new babies?  The tree finds root even in the cleft of dry rock, life emerges, thrives . . .
Click the merch link above or visit: www.jupmodesupply.com/collections/delfi-music/products/delfi-music-short-sleeve-tee?variant=21281216168016  My drum from childhood. And now a child has broken it.
Carried through many reckless nights of blissful revelry, we play, sing, pour ourselves out to Time. And Time comes with the image of ourselves to break the things we were. To bring us to something new. A new song. To tell the truth: the tear began a long time ago, and I carried it so many years, and played my songs upon its wound. Now a child finishes what childhood began.  Is there any twentieth century symphony more beautiful then his third?
Says Whitman in Song of Myself:
To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door. Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed, Let the physician and the priest go home. I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will, O despairer, here is my neck, By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me. I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up, Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force, Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.  Rodin's Hand of God, a copy sits on my writing desk, a gift from the one I love:
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/collections/sculptures/hand-god I saw it at the Rodin Museum in Philly, years ago: http://www.rodinmuseum.org/ Go to the Paris museum also, but go because Rilke wrote there. He has no visible work in the rooms; he poured himself outward interminably through the sunlit windows. Here's some of that sunlight: dem Schiff als Küste und dem Land als Schiff Night, the second single from the Nature EP, will be live in a few days. We go through the days to night, through night to day. We go through division, to identities that are unique but not separate, different but not other. Night is about fruitful gardens overflowing in the small backyards of old towns. The love of grandmothers, mothers, gardeners. The cathedral towers of Seville and the starred ceilings of Alhambra. The descent and the descending...
I was asked about the words to orchids. Long days in the deserts of the west in the springtime, long years in the desert of the soul, two short prolific afternoons on laguna beach littered with seaweed from the high tide. The hidden depths wash up to lighted splendor. Cold water in the desert. Salt water. How I long to be hot or cold; lukewarm I am exiled. Once, I saw Morrissey perform Ask live.
 I think of the first time I flew into Mexico City at night: lights spread to the horizon in all directions, washing up the sides of hills until the earth was too steep to build higher. A phosphorescent sea. This is how music, voices go out, to wash against the ends of creation, push them outward, fill void with light.
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