October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
There is a democracy to the glittering color of the strings in motion, a lore of light, a sun in a night sky. Out at sea, someone brainstorms the birth of a new string quartet. They can almost blurt it at the waves. The prism in my dream is gone. I remember the fifty primary words I need in December, including ballet, champagne and embroidery, and I know I have as many things to say about the bright side of the moon as about the dark side. Setting sun seen through a frosted windowpane. Stand back and we’re a constellation.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
The tears in your Cherokee snow-heart bend my life (which is a badly dented teakettle) toward spring water, and my eyes and memories in blood-structure sear face and heart. I have heard autumn’s glass rivers glaze and break free again and again, and I drink to them. Black aircraft enter a singing death. The music in the painter returns: is sent forth and returns. So glitter we from Haydn to Dryden and from Dryden to Haydn. Of unsound design is the cola made of fresh violet, and only halting celebration in our years. Exemplar! Exemplar! Whose clutch drifted.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
There is density in my need to express. I wonder how long this will be true, how long it will be before the words might cool down. I wonder if I will see them cool down. I wonder if my eyes will see a panorama before me every day. I would sit with those who have given up everything for their word-jewelry, their word-sunlight. I should write more about the sounds of empire, but we fear empire if we want a human world. We don’t want the chords to break off. A drenching afternoon rain improves the weather.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Cassandra, say what you mean in this cool afternoon, say what you choose, sing the song in every detail until it detonates in the hearer like a hundred angry roses onstage with a lightning unforgettable–we shall listen as though you were singing from the unreal. Such violet achievements resemble words from the Cherokee tongue. I am alone now with the Cherokee word for “tears.” Moisture is invitation to experience the highest love. The heart must be moist if we are to make our researches among tints and clutch the universe to our core. Our future shall be fusion’s power.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Cassandra, say what you mean when those hypnotic ideas come to you. Bring them to life–capture them for the natural world like the paintings on glass that we preserve. Your ideas are the fresh spring water gathered at its source in the forest, a place where I have been. We shall travel there, wandering through the underbrush, for we know it is there. We are there in reality, we are there in the imagination. Morning is best for water-gathering, before the delicate heat comes to root in the electronic petals of afternoon. Music is water from the deep.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Mirth in her eyes in the morning. Her eyes are etched and glittering by the door white-hot from fresh sunlight. Breathe easily, say what you mean. The years are dry leaves now. Summer dust touches the chamber. She found a coin engraved with sheaves of wheat. The oldest shadows hide under the newest. Dark cherries are the design on her personal correspondence, and now she must write a letter. All of her letters are self-portraits, but she has a passion to break through to her reader. She is otherwise imprisoned. Corresponding with a musician, she can be sonorous.
