 Past
Is Prologue (Song For Emily Dickinson)
(3:55) [10/8/99]
MP3
Liner Notes
Like when Mother said,
“Don’t fill up on hors d’oeuvres; main course is next to come,”
You grasped at God’s realm from your wood desk, no pious parishioner trapped
in some
Locket’s cameo, nor one who hides behind (to block the Sun)
The visor of the truck in front of them. You always tried to plumb
While I lull myself to sleep with Sounds of Simon:
Senator Paul saw a wall of cynic’s cement hardening, or
So his last letter to Illinoisans
Said, but your heart survives, our most friendly harbinger.
|
The past is prologue.
The past is prologue. |
(Friendly for it forgets pains -----
Renal failures & lupus lay slain.)
|
Day in / out, the scenery tumbles changes upwards; geese’s clutzy grace
Returns. We don’t see them, they don’t see us (in finned & flippered
cars) fold space
& grease by, flying in the face of pattern. I know little Sexton sings
& Emmy presents guard over Vineyard gates with ah! bright wings,
While Sayles, Van Gogh, & “Uncle” Rick work in basements, solo;
Open-handed B3s from Wilco;
Darger, Phair, McNaughton ----- Someone’s light beams tear
The roof off their apartment room somewhere.
|
The past is prologue.
The past is prologue. |
(Remember Prospice’s precipice -----
The husbandmen all gone, groundless.) |
A Tender Pioneer lives here (& not above this place)
To kiss our tears & layaway our fears. But that jump to hyperspace
Has moments of disorienting ----- like life without the pain.
Recall where you are & swoop the deathbed where you’ve lain.
You’re like the miracle of the baby bird
Who knows a life is there outside the shell:
When you’re old enough to know,
You can smash the dark, & go
Into the next world, limitless in size.
|
The past is prologue.
The past is prologue.
The past is prologue.
This place is prologue.
|
(He won’t forget you were the one
Who caught His bouquet, “prodigal son”;
Happy those like you who’ve worked since dawn.)
|
| |
Despite high-alert vigilance & the home recording revolution, things
are so enormously ghettoized & fragmented that we may never stumble
onto the website of the next hermit genius. Will anyone come if we build
it? Will they give us enough time to explain our vision? Often we feel
like some grim parody of the geese mentioned here: our stiff necks pointed
down, waddling towards foggy notions of greatness while the real genius
rushes past unseen, a Day-Glo car in an ocean of gray SUVs.
Greg “Place On The” Boerner - Guitar / Theresa Brooks - Bass Guitar
“This
World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond -----
Invisible, as Music -----
But positive, as Sound -----
It beckons, and it baffles -----
Philosophy ----- don’t know -----
And through a Riddle, at the last -----
Sagacity, must go -----
To guess it, puzzles scholars -----
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown -----
Faith slips ----- and laughs, and rallies -----
Blushes, if any see -----
Plucks at a twig of Evidence -----
And asks a Vane, the way -----
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -----
Strong Hallelujahs roll -----
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul ----- ”
- Emily Dickinson, “This World Is Not Conclusion” (1862)
“The ashtray says
You were up all night
When you went to bed
With your darkest mind
Your pillow wept
And covered your eyes
You finally slept
While the sun caught fire
You’ve changed.”
- Jeff Tweedy, “A Shot In The Arm” (1999)
|
|
