Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

(Eugenio Montale, Cuttlefish Bones)

http://www.clipser.com/watch_video/1313316

The audio/video synch is a little off. But trust me, it's good.

Each night, Dzia-Dzia would tell me more about Chopin, describing the preludes or ballades or mazurkas, so that even if I hadn't heard them I could imagine them, especially Dzia-Dzia's favorites, the nocturnes, shimmering like black pools.

"She's playing her way through the waltzes," Dzia-Dzia told me, speaking as usual in his low, raspy voice as if we were having a confidential discussion. "She's young but already knows Chopin's secret--a waltz can tell more about the soul than a hymn."

By my bedtime the kitchen table would be shaking so much that it was impossible to practice penmanship any longer. Across from me, Dzia-Dzia, his hair, eyebrows, and ear tufts wild and white, swayed in his chair, with his eyes squeezed closed and a look of rapture on his face as his fingers pummeled the tabletop. He played the entire width of the table, his body leaning and twisting as his fingers swept the keyboard, left hand pounding at those chords that jangled silverware, while his right raced through runs across tacky oilcloth. His feet pumped the empty bucket. If I watched him, then closed my eyes, it sounded as if two pianos were playing.

- Stuart Dybeck, from "Chopin in Winter" in The Coast of Chicago, pg. 21

Bret Christensen Go to the album Amanda and Luke's Wedding

The breath of God is his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

"a moon-wound ocean"

(Tanuja Desai Hidier, Born Confused, 204)

Nick Brandt

Open
the book of time
with trembling
fingers, and read:
your life
that is chained
to this page;
your lover
who will tell you
the first mystery
and the last.

(Sargon Boulus, "How Middle-Eastern Singing Was Born," Language for a New Century, 468)