Words in the Air

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   For the Sleepwalkers by Edward Hirsch   Tonight I want to say something wonderful for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith in their legs, so much faith in the invisible   arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path that leads to the stairs instead of the window, the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.   I love the way that sleepwalkers ar...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   Late Spring - By W.S. Merwin   Coming into the high room again after years after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies after losses and feet on stairs   after looking and mistakes and forgetting turning there thinking to find no one except those I knew finally I saw you sitting in white already waiting   you of whom I had heard with my own...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   In the Corridor By Saskia Hamilton I passed through, I should have paused, there were a hundred doors. One opened. In there, someone whose name is not yet known to me lived out   his middle years in simple terms, two chairs, one place laid for early breakfast, one plate with dry toast and butter softening. There his mind raced through writings   he had...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman     A Certain Lady By Dorothy Parker Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,       And drink your rushing words with eager lips,   And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,       And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.   When you rehearse your list of loves to me,       Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.   And you laugh back, nor can...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman All My Pretty Ones By Anne Sexton Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart where you followed our mother to her cold slumber; a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,   leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber   you from the residence you could not afford:   a gold key, your half of a woolen mill, twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,   the...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   Waiting by Raymond Carver Left off the highway and down the hill. At the bottom, hang another left. Keep bearing left. The road will make a Y. Left again. There’s a creek on the left. Keep going. Just before the road ends, there’ll be another road. Take it and no other. Otherwise, your life will be ruined forever. There’s a log house with a shake roof,...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   This Morning by Charles Simic  Enter without knocking, hard-working ant. I'm just sitting here mulling over What to do this dark, overcast day? It was a night of the radio turned down low, Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams. I woke up lovesick and confused. I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing And some bird answering her, But it was the r...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   Upon Nothing BY JOHN WILMOT EARL OF ROCHESTER Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade: That hadst a being ere the world was made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid.   Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, When primitive Nothing Something straight begot; Then all proceeded from the great united What.   Something, the general a...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   De Profundis by  Georg Trakl   It is a stubble-field where black rain falls. It is a dark-brown tree that stands alone. It is a soughing wind that swirls round empty huts – How dismal this evening.   Passing the hamlet The gentle orphan girl still gathers scanty ears of corn. Round and golden her eyes feast on the gathering dusk, Her lap yearning for t...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman The Applicant BY SYLVIA PLATH First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and rol...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman For Love by Robert Creeley for Bobbie Yesterday I wanted to speak of it, that sense above   the others to me important because all that I know derives from what it teaches me.   Today, what is it that   is finally so helpless, different, despairs of its own   statement, wants to turn away, endlessly to turn away. If the moon did not ... no, if you did no...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman All Night, All Night by Delmore Schwartz Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and attitudes The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read, Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.   Looked out at the night, unable to di...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   The Night Where You No Longer Live by Meghan O'Rourke   Was it like lifting a veil And was the grass treacherous, the green grass   Did you think of your own mother   Was it like a virus Did the software flicker   And was this the beginning Was it like that   Was there gas station food   and was it a long trip     And is there sun there or drones or pu...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman The Night City BY W. S. GRAHAM Unmet at Euston in a dream Of London under Turner’s steam Misting the iron gantries, I Found myself running away From Scotland into the golden city.   I ran down Gray’s Inn Road and ran Till I was under a black bridge. This was me at nineteen Late at night arriving between The buildings of the City of London.   And the I (O...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman                 Mirrors By Jorge Luis Borges   I have been horrified before all mirrors not just before the impenetrable glass, the end and the beginning of that space, inhabited by nothing but reflections,   but faced with specular water, mirroring the other blue within its bottomless sky, incised at times by the illusory flight of inverted birds, or tr...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   Crossroads in the Past BY JOHN ASHBERY That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”   I tell you, something went wron...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   Fears and Scruples  (1876) by Robert Browning   Here's my case. Of old I used to love him,     This same unseen friend, before I knew: Dream there was none like him, none above him,—     Wake to hope and trust my dream was true. Loved I not his letters full of beauty?     Not his actions famous far and wide? Absent, he would know I vowed him duty;    ...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry     Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman One Night in Balthazar By Fanny Howe   The hotel bar downstairs was dirty and dark and almost empty except for him whom I didn’t know   I lost my balance because evil is aroused by absence     Outside on the island a brick city had grown up and old   A person could only nibble on its shadows     Where was my beloved?   The cornerstone was familiar but un...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman A Terror is More Certain . . . BY BOB KAUFMAN A terror is more certain than all the rare desirable popular songs I know, than even now when all of my myths have become . . . , & walk around in black shiny galoshes & carry dirty laundry to & fro, & read great books & don’t know criminals intimately, & publish fat books of the month & have wifeys that are...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman Aubade by Philip Larkin I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.     Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.     In time the curtain-edges will grow light.     Till then I see what’s really always there:     Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,     Making all thought impossible but how     And where and when I shall myself die.     Arid interr...

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman Poems Read: The Solstice By W.S. Merwin Der Leiermann by Wilhelm Müller & Snowfall by Mark Strand   Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   I remember walking out of the ocean. What struggle! Millions of mollusk years and shell games that hurt. I remember getting up from all fours and looking down on all my astonished variously shaped former friends. Not one of them wanted to look up at me now I was up. Bipedal and lonely until there were a bunch of others. I remember the first scene in 20...

Three poems from Alphabet de soleils C The banner of your body floats in the Brandenburg wind. An old woman wants to come in, I can see her through the door, her red felt hand pressing in vain on the latch, scraps of her cries come at me like the barbaric song of a violin mending the night; I’m going to slip a rose under the door a black-blooded rose, maybe she’ll go away? And I could wallow in th...