Alan Gould: From ‘Nine Homages to Ralph Vaughan Williams’

From “Nine Homages to Ralph Vaughan Williams”

 

2. “A Running Set”

(From the RVW of that title)

 

Bassoons send bees between the trees,

a shoulder catches sun,

and someone needs her dropped chemise

if she can be outrun.

 

I do not need my dropped chemise.

   I cannot be outrun,

for shapeliest of bumblebees,

   I run so If and Soon

 

disport themselves at brinks of choice

   where lively is the dance

with all who ever could rejoice

   in their insouciance.

 

If you disport beside a creek,

what if a damsel-fly

should pause to arch its fine physique

and ask the question why …

 

“… Why am I here, why are you You?

Is Why the same as How?

Is Being just a bright bijou?

And can I call you thou?”

 

The bracelets on a damsel-fly

   glow blue and scintillant,

and brute the rules they satisfy

   yet I am nonchalant,

 

blow hey for muddle, hey for Soon,

while little dogs play peek-a-boo.

A violin pursues the moon

   and I play catch with you.

 

 

 

 

 

3. Glissando from a Violin

(from RVW, The Charterhouse Suite)

 

Glissando from a violin

provides the absence I am in,

alighting me on lawn or stone

as though my being had no bone,

 

where now a debonairing cello

recovers presence for some fellow

who steps out, portly and urbane,

as inward fiddle keeps him sane,

 

yet will not zero on his place,

will fix no harum-scarum face,

but stir his presence to such sway,

elides what’s here with what’s away.

 

So I live in presentiment

and tease these feints that come half-meant

along vibrations in the air,

to ultrasound my everywhere.

 

 

 

 

4. A Sublime

(The Margaret Price solo from RVW, The Pastoral Symphony)

As though her O

were auroral swell,

as fine to earth as

soul-tissue, to flow

in the deep interval

between a molecule

and a molecule, she airs

this, awes this, for she’s

a-stream in vowel, in

vowel’s seamless fibre, O

quavered exhalation

from a stub pencil’s

uplift into aria, into

O-finds-O,

and O her liquidity,

her ur-genius

to rise to this somehow,

this blue elation

from our pre-noun, from

our pre-orchestral

hold on Whole

on Real, an O-waver

where old Ralph, old

serenity meadowed

in fustian at its,

wisest ear for joy,

pencils the vowelled human,

finding singularity,

a tendril out of null,

a sonar meniscus so

local and exquisite

to transcend our air.

 

 

 

 

6. Softly on the Water

(from RVW, Six Studies in English Folk Song)

 

The cello finds the dragonfly.

It swerves and stalls like ego in a dream

until piano’s slicked liquidity

uncoils the cognac of a  stream,

 

where dragonfly must hold its poise,

electron fury in our summer airs,

while this melisma easily alloys

a wow-and-yes that holds our ears,

 

where Being gives its feral “Yes”

to how a pool of air, commodiously

is brought to pitch and then must deliquesce

to turn our mundane instants into spree.

 

7. Holy Song

(from RVW, Arrangement of Psalm 34, “O Taste and See …”)

 

I’m lonely as that fly

above the map of Europe,

that knows there’s scarce one other fly

sharing this quantum syrup.

 

Can I pick carbon bias,

molecules shy as smiles,

going broad on curves of space,

heedless of all meanwhiles,

 

secreting fatty acids

encoded with encores

that permeate my membranes where

new Being opens doors?

 

A choir dreams pure tune,

the cosmos is its doodle,

and every puzzle in that air

has Being as its middle.

 

9. Anne, Oboe and Strings

 (RVW’s Oboe Concerto)

 

When air is made it claims no architecture.

These strings and oboe quicken emptiness,

finding the pulse and shape of air’s conjecture

to flood it with their momentary excess,

 

say oboe rousing weather in a house

where plums and ginger cook upon a stove,

and oboe-flow comes seeking where black puss

and newlywed Anne/Alan doze en rêve,

 

while violins insinuate a green

that equally is peace between the stars.

How does an air decide its darling mean?

What shiver turns what’s me to what is ours

 

where you are dark with curls and new with child,

and Queanbeyan air is lithe with oboe scaled

exactly for the scent in dream that comes

from stewing ginger, honey, greengage plums?

Alan Gould