Marly Youmans
Spiegel im Spiegel, no. 2
Awdl Gywydd after Arvo Pärt
Spiral longing of the notes,
Line that floats as soft as snow,
Dance of bare, angelic feet,
Memory in sweetest flow,
Joys whose solace is to weep,
Room to keep the faded dead,
Hills of winter blossoming,
Balm the graceful thing unsaid,
Gold the terraced paradise,
Gold the skies of endlessness,
Gold the footsteps on the trail,
Gold the art to veil and bless.
A Most Excellent Fancy
Lines indebted to the legacy of André Tchaikowsky’s head
and the Royal Shakespeare Company
To play the part of Yorick, you must die,
So when you come to say your last good-bye,
Be sure to leave your severed head to rot
In some light-threshing English garden plot
Where jaws refrain from sounding notes or words
And bone is whistled clean by bugs and birds.
When Hamlet finds the jester Yorick null
In raising from gravedigger’s earth your skull,
You perform as glum memento mori,
Yielding up no song or ribald story,
Allowing sockets that once cradled eyes
To be the staring darks that sermonize,
Breeding nightmares born of death and Hades
In courtly gentlemen and highborn ladies.
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