Christian Asplund - Composer

Sometimes the words…

Sometimes the words are beyond my
control
Like antic cats
And I am dumb to tell them
That soon we both will be buried.
Unless they are caught and
groomed
I must leave my careless pets
To fend for themselves
And follow me to dust.

The whole thing is so scary…

            The whole thing is so scary:

            Wanting to know how it will end but

            But knowing that the only

            Only way to know for sure is to end it.

                        And some do.

            Falling into things or

            Or letting themselves be pushed.

12 April 1983

In my ears…

In my ears, walking towards home on a rainy evening,

 

Ring psalms and villanelles, ballads and odes and odes;

 

my feet clicking through small, silver pools.

 

And ‘gainst the general gray, truth is silhouette,

                                    tangled trees and roads

 

Take on the dark unity of written, rhyming lines;

                                                discursive

 

Letter, letter, line, page run together like the rain

 

Of raindrops.  Poetry that thus would live

 

Must surely die.  And stanzas challenging the sky

 

Will soon set as seen; or shift their gathering nimbus in wind

 

And light.  This poetry is not of me.  It is part of a silhouette

 

The rhymes and lines write through silver pools,

 

And tangled trees that weave and dance against the wet

 

Gray and in silver pools, and walk along the road

 

To home.  And should I whisper those whispered stanzas

 

They would tell no more about their  oneness with

                                                silhouette and cloud

Than debris in the road…..

 

A broken black twig or a handful of rain.

Feb. 21/83

LOOKING AT A UTAH ROAD MAP

It is pinched now, like any epic brought to line and page.
Pressed like flowers n a book is the land. The stingy pines,
The dry mountains, the creeks, the desperate sage
Are marks and scratches in a map with interstates and highway signs.
One-quarter inch equals each mile of blessed Zion wide—
Of love and hate between sons and brothers; of hope and dread;
Of charity and sin, trusting time’s vast capacity to hide
In ink and ledgers; waiting there for the anxious pilgrim to read
The secret signs and markings—the promises of a promised land
Vernal, Fairview, Pleasant Grove.
Richfield, Fruitland, Bountiful;
Eden, Garland, Sunnyside.
And hear hidden music to soothe hurt hope
Tooele, Payson, Kamas;
Manti, Parowan.
There, too, the tales of will and power told by men
Who chose to mark the map
Heber, Murray, Hyrum, Hinckley.
Woodruff and Brigham City.
But somewhere near the edge of myths, reminders
Small of second sons and lost prayers still linger
Sandy, Thistle and Hurricane, Sulphurdale, Salina
Faust and Thermo. Muddy Creek and Dirty Devil.

–C. Thomas Asplund

C. Thomas Asplund

A Comforter

Still you come to me in the night
Walking with bare feet whispering
And still you force me to come round corners that could wait,
To face a minor premise I am avoiding.

Still you draw me from the logic of time,
Reasoning with knots and pieces
Now that I have turned round corners that should wait,
To leave a minor premise I am enjoying.

Still you push me down a busy street,
Whispering of dead men talking,
Until we come to corners that should meet
Upon a minor premise I am trusting.

Still I come to you in the night
Wakened to a silken apron’s rustling,
And still I end in corners that must wait
To trap a minor premise I am hiding.
“HEY, OLD MAN…”
by C. Thomas Asplund

Hey, old man, you left too soon

Sunday afternoon
students lumping around a dormitory room
hall phone rings again
carelessly chattering

“It’s long distance.”

Uncle John: Are you sitting down?
Me: There’s no chair.
Uncle John: You’d better find a chair.
Me: I’m not tired.
Uncle John: But it’s bad news.
Me: Well, tell me. Just tell me.

Oh once together in a mountain camp
I had threatened your reverie of time and talk
So you found a six-foot willow stick
butchers’ string
a borrowed hook
a laugh
as you sent me to the creek to keep busy.

Well I dappled a reluctant grasshopper
whistling that willow into the roar and churn of mountain water
beside a wild columbine
Into an island pool an eternal green deep caught
behind a fallen tree and sloping rock
so reverent I was
in that green holy of pine and moss.
dapple
dapple
dapple
snnnap
Holy Moses
that little bugger grabbed
and I grabbed
and he flew gold
and silver
and jeweled
and fell hookless
shining on the slippery stone
and heaven-held for a moment,
crimson gills heaving beyond my commitment
beyond my frozen grasp and slick as a moment
sliding from my touch
my wonder
he jerked
flipped
mossward
again to that green mystery.

And you laughed and told your friends
because luck was bad that day,
“my boy got one on butchers’ string.”

But I couldn’t show you because it got away.
And now I can’t show you anything
because you got away.

SKIPPING STONES
By C. Thomas Asplund

To waters’ edge my child and I have come
Where currents have coughed up this ample trove
Wind and water washed, cool stones
Deep and smooth as petals fallen from a ripe rose
Glacier-ground through sweeping eons to this moraine.
Stirred in cracks where earth and earth meet,
Laid down and trod upon by behemoth and leviathan.

My fingers pick one and hoist it like a cool fruit.
Pygmalion would have chipped and polished for a generation to form
So fine a folded edge.
Now coil my body; cock my arm,
And fling obliquely at full reach
I send it over the water, watch it fly.

It touches the surface like a winging water bird
And flies again. And again retakes the sky
Leaving a dimpled echo with each stride –
Steps, one two three four five –
Until it settles back to those depths
That drove it up.

I straighten up and give
My eyes to my child; another generation accepts
For a fleeting, faithful moment, the miracle.
By my hand a stone could fly and walk on water.

CONVERT BAPTISM
By C. Thomas Asplund

As Christ stood, stand we now?
No muddy Jordan; but smooth tile
And white cotton where once a hairy goathide hung;
And no dove comes down the slant of brown chapel light.
But for a moment witnesses with bent head and fallen hands
Without the world, without a word
The congregation stands
Posed by the infinite question:

“Master – is it I?”

As Christ stood stand we now!
From this grace to grace forward
Pure within this moment
Beyond the water or the word
For as in Adam all men die
Even so in Eve are all men quickened by a common cord.

And down we fall in the deaf rush of water,
Down in the hole from here to Kolob
Hostages to the running tide of belief
We tumble from Eden and the ecstasy of anticipation
To Gethsemane and the ecstasy of faith.

Upon This Rock
C. Thomas Asplund

We laughed in the temple
and found favor where
the Lord lashed with lightening and laughed too

when he saw the size of salvation.

Adam between the consecrated trees
tied his hammock for secure slumber
and fell not with the night
and with the morning rose not
but slept in the sun

As tangled fishermen slept too, in a garden
tumbled in sleep
secure in the infinite grass
and dreamt of glory which flashed by them in the night
then shattered like a crowd of guilty waifs found
apple-stealing
when Old Man Death raged.

Oh Jesus loves this careless freckled world
that stretches aimlessly where
lilies left and fig blooms blown

(eye hath not seen)
blackbird whistle and bobwhite song
(nor ear heard)
and hours and days that no man knoweth
flutter
fall
in the forest
like
wastrel leaves

With all of that
Jesus had to trust His Judas
A calculated concern
(dreamless with the pungent balm of love
frugal with the poisoned sacrament of sop)

to tie Him on a tree.

Psalm
C. Thomas Asplund

His voice has swept over land and water;
It rushes beyond our electric urgencies
And the tumult of our machinery.
His voice sounds above all commerce and architecture.
The waves and fields resound its errand
And under dense groves, in our alien empire
His voice witnesses the sun and
Spreads our emerald eyes.
It heals our craven canticles
And names our children Almighty.

By His voice the meanest peddler is Magus,
Bearer of frankincense and grandeur.
By his voice the gleaner’s rags sweep
Gold from vain furrows;
Blind beggars shout atoning lies
And by His voice their lies are scripture.

His voice is as apparent as mountains and
Across its snows and meadows pilgrims
Contend its peaks and passes
And in the jeopardy of their return
Proclaim as one:

Assume all lost but what He saves.
All burdens bear but for His grace,
Without His ransom all are slaves.
Assume all pain but for His peace,
His order stills the engine of fate;
Assume all is senseless but for His wisdom,
Assume darkness but for His light.
After all else, praise Him.

Emma Smith Speaks Her Piece
C. Thomas Asplund

I asked you not to go
But someone got there first
With other words
As they so often do;
So now I speak my piece.

Please, forgive
A wife’s proclivity for last words
And fond distrust of those
Who dream
Without sleeping.

Please know
Of all my pains
None is more exquisite than
That inflicted by
This understanding: the only
Reward God gives a true prophet
Is the vision.

In the end nothing was yours,
Not even the mantle.

And please know, too,
That I was less jealous
Of other handmaidens
Than I was of
Other voices.

Ode to John Berryman: From Failing Poet to Successful Poet
C. Thomas Asplund

To our fractured fraternity he was a miracle;
A poet not only in hardcover, but in Life Magazine.
Well, Life is gone
And so is John.
Ignoring the conventional wisdom
Whatever John had he took it with him.

Berryman leaped from his bridge
Apparently to prove that even a light-minded poet
Is subject to certain laws of gravity:
Or maybe just to see what would leap up to meet him
Under his bridge, his dream, his song.

We poor poets watched in wonder:
“I have read some fine writers in my time,” he said.
I have red hairs on my chest, says I.
And why not
Give a poem a shape or a haircut or a drink
let it grow and stink and
let it find its own resting place
For Mr. Bones (like Mr. Berryman like water)
Seeks its own level but finds,
Workmanship being what it is these days,
There is no perfect level.
So John must ever seek
Or satisfy with less than best like some desk drawer Dante.
And then again, maybe he just
Wanted to test the wind
But there was none except what he could make himself.

Hymnsong C. Thomas Asplund

I have sung these hymns so often
Fragile wisps now frail and broken.
Prayers by word and music we try to soften
Let them hang where gentle hours surround them.

These hymns are traced so lightly I often
Slight them as I worship with my congregation
Confused that to beg eternity such a feeble thing is chosen,
Not scratched in stone as man to man has spoken.

Temples have been piled from generation, stone by stone,
To generation, standing when the sounds and hymns are gone.
Broken walls we pile again to find the wisdom of Solomon
But gone, gone from here is David’s harp, and David’s song.
Seagulls C. Thomas Asplund

I opened up my land one silver day in May,
Set the blades and watched them cut the winter leavings.
The tractor, freshly tuned, responded eagerly to my clear hand
On wheel & throttle. And the sun cut through my jacket
So I pulled it off—shirt, too,
And set my bare back to the stroking sun.

Seagulls wheeled in from the slough, screaming
And settled down strutting through fresh furrows to take
An easy meal of earthworms, ant eggs, wood lice
grubs, crickets and whatever else swimming in the soil
Might suit a fancy.

The seagull is a stupid bird. Built for beauty
They wheel through those hidden currents of silent air
By fortunate instinct and imposed design
Riding on harmony’s freedom, soaring & dipping
Into any context.

As now, tea party white & china grey against the peasant prairie
I see the savage innocence of eyes empty of contemplation
And wheel across my last tracks—swerve towards a languid gull
Impudent in the comfort of warm spring ground.
It rises easily before me, joyless, it flaps
Five times, spreads itself and hangs on a prayer’s breath.

I wonder to what extent it believes
I was created to plough the ground
So gulls can eat.

To Patricia C. Thomas Asplund
(the unfinished sonnet)

Bright as you are in the radiant sun of love,
Night’s closed nearness shades thy careful angles
And measures depth of each soft crease, width of
Each warm turn. Thy shadows are blue bangles—
Persian sapphires, robbed from a frozen midnight sky—
Gothic moonstones, fused and tempered by still-warm fire—
Polished and carved in a lonely mountain monastery
With the quiet skill of love and the patience of desire.

But now, close in the darkness, you are shadowed in light;
Your care-turned beauty is couched on careful shades of bright
Living jewels, which echo from our day the past,
The new, the false, the true of shadow’s cast.

Christian C. Thomas Asplund

An arrow sprung will find its path;
Trajectory, wind, friction, gravity will
take their measure
Before an end is found.
But the stubborn arrow
With forces and powers and laws drawn from foundations
of the universe
Will find its way
Will insist on its share of the course.
I am the blind archer to you;
The only comfort to my blindness
Is faith in human will.
Which faith is justified
By your trembling, vibrating, rushing, beyond my sense
Unintimidated by bruised corners and splintered edges.

Emily and Innocence C. Thomas Asplund

I watched you in the garden when you were not aware.
Attending worlds and wonders I could never see,
You spoke small and stormless questions I would never dare
And answered from intimacies I could never free.
I saw my history written in your bent and quiet muse—
Part of me that had been innocent and worthy I perceived.
It came like the meeting of an old love—
Passion gone, a true respect received.

No longer do I look with your eyes into that twirled blossom
Or flashing butterfly, as once flesh
Of my flesh I saw with infant eyes the budding revelation come.
It is enlightenment now, not light I watch.
Soon you’ll turn and run to me when you are done,
And I’ll recall a day when man and child were one.

“Winging to Cathay…” C. Thomas Asplund

On this bronze hammered horse
That flies in its fixed & frozen moment
Hanging over the world
I find my own new world.
Taking civilization to China!
I see my own new world for the first time.
Great Bear, Great Slave, Athabasca
Frozen miles from my flying horse
So new they are breathless
Skinny Trails of Caribou tracks
Plod far from my flying horse
This heavy land that hangs
Above us.
And I learn about it while going to China

From China Journal, 5 May 1987

The Bee’s Dance
C. Thomas Asplund

I am impressed to tell you that I have found flowers.
I desire beyond my understanding
To share with you cascades of colour and nectar
That are mine. Like a golden city lost over mountain meadows
I have found this magic place—
Pastel rooms that breath soft light and sweet delight
clovers and asters and booming roses
high honeysuckle and lofty lilacs
mimosa and easy dandelions
I have breathed their honey and caressed their color;
And it is more than I can contain
And quivering I return. I cannot hold
Myself in peace
In this seizure of joy, and so I dance
And my dance is intended to tell my joy
It is meant to give my joy a form for you to see and share
My dance is composed to share with you the
joy and the flowers.
I cannot repose. I must move;
And I try to choreograph my joy, my restless force
To our music—to the songs we have shared

Because I think you have felt small joy in those songs
with me
And you might now share the flowers with me.
Our majestic music is not equal to the joy—
Sometimes it is too heavy to move.
It bears too many messages.
But there is no other language,
Nothing else we share
And my joy is beyond the reality of our shared song.

Old bees tell me I don’t really mean it.
I dance in drunkenness, they say.
My reeling reality is ruled by the colour and clamour
of sensation on my cells.
Our shared song is a totem, engraven primordially
by the rush of wind and fire
Before bees were
Before bees danced;
And I and my joy, like a split rock, are formed by dumb forces
And lawless laws.

But I do mean to share my flowers with you.
And I fail.
You do not hear my mind music or understand the delusion
of my dance.
You do not see flowers in my dance
Or taste their nectar.

And because you don’t, I know the intention is mine—
It doesn’t belong to the fires and furies
Before bees and flowers were.
Failure proves that I alone created that
inadequate intention
That will die when frost fells the flowers
And I tire of my dance.

“SOUTH ALONG BAISHIQIAO LU…”
by C. Thomas Asplund

South along Baishiqiao Lu,
The street that runs along the wall
Separating China from
The Friendship Hotel
Is a small park
Heavy with the dust that is China –
No more than 40 trees – shaggy-leafed locusts (to my
unpracticed eye) and plain poplars and paving stones
Full of dust
Instead of grass.
Where old men bring their birds.
Every day they peel off from the grey river of bicycles
On Baishiqiao Lu
And glide into that park
Bicycle bell ringing
And in that language of fragrant tones
So far beyond me
Speak and smile what I know to be
That happiest of songs
Sung by friends glad to see each other.
Two, sometimes three, cages strapped to each bike,
Covered in neat denim
Quilted against the cold, they are hung from low branches of the trees
Like strange fruit.
Properly spaced and the covers peeled back (spaced like diners in an all-night coffee shop)
To blind them from one another.
The old men say
If they see one another sing, they will imitate and
Lose their distinctive song.
Each sings in its own voice.
Pulling its head down into a fat
Throat throat like an Italian tenor
The voice bursts out like a shot from a cannon. (like a smile)
Trills and arpeggios
Unaccompanied suites of such unrivalled goldenness
That Mozart himself – gift of God – would weep
These plain fat wrens, with neither color
Nor to confirm them
Flightless birds that preen their vain voices
In prayer or praise or sheer joy
Long days to listen to birds and buses along the Baishiqiao Lu
And sometimes the old men take the cages
Whose bamboo bars blend form and function
In the strength of a civilization that has
Weathered wind and hunger and blood and long pointless days along the Baishiqiao Lu to the
Farthest echoes of time
…so sometimes the old men take these cages
And swing them in slow arcs above their heads
And back again.
The birds flap and grasp their perches.
To hold themselves from death and destruction as their world
Tumbles and turns in senseless spasms and revolutions.
It is to exercise the birds, make them try
Their wings, else they become fat and lazy
And die.
And the old men pinch their eyes into
Peasant smiles
And show their old men teeth.
My first instinct is to wonder what the birds cost.
So much time is spent selling and buying things
Good fortune more than good sense bars me
From revealing that I might think – even with half a mind
That these birds are items of commerce.
Sometimes the quilted cover of language
Saves us from ourselves.

Then I return to the Friendship Hotel Garden
Behind the wall.
The amah’s bounce balls to children in the twilight
I dream of home
And watch a raven, featureless against
The salmon-coloured sky
Flap and fly and land on the imperial orb
That tops the turret of the Friendship Hotel.
The crow becomes one with the birds and dragons of
[The rest of the poem is cut off]

“My mother is so wise…”

My mother is so wise she can eat persimmons
and still look like she has a secret.

Peace can be scrounged from her handbag
like pennies or a spare comb.

Nourishment spills from her hands.

Her face, like June, has no season.

Her ears hear only triumph

And her eyes reflect our fire
and shed our blocked tears.

C. Thomas Asplund
13 April 1983 (from a journal)

C. Thomas Asplund

GENESIS

Genesis holds no mystery for me.
I am a creator.
Each moment I take chaos – the unformed –
And I form it.
I say, “Let there be light,”
And there is comprehension.
From the thin skin of the world
To the thin skin of time
I make all time
And the point on which the universe spins
I can transform from sacred to profane.
I can cleanse that which is vile.
I can create love;
I can create hate.
I can connect the tree and the song –
Make them a unity.
Or I can tear them apart.
A thousand careless sounds become my song;
My cries and hums become a story,
A prayer.
If the nihilist tells me that life is ridiculous
I can only ask, “Compare to what?”
If the nihilist says, “I will make a work of art
To celebrate my nihilism.”
I can only surmise that his act of creation
Denies his nihilism.
He makes sense.
He desries that someone share that sense.
Out of blackness
He has created light.
Out of the unformed
He has created a community.
Out of the uncaring
He has cared.
Entropy does not exist.
If it seems the universe is pulling apart-
Rattling to pieces,
Falling under its own dumb forces-
Know this, it will return.
If we pull it apart,
Cast away its pieces,
It will come together.
The very will by which I pull it apart
Is the force that brings it together.
From dust I can make a person.
From sensation I can make an idea.
From the flying forces of the universe
I can make a reason.
And though I return to dust
To sensation
To the flying forces of the universe,
I shall return.
And though I fall from despair to failure
Heaven shall be my home.

October 1987

“TWO SIDES…”
C. Thomas Asplund

Two sides – the intellect and the romantic.
I ended up a martyr & he ended up a heretic.

Answer to your prayer.

“Again the adversary…”
by C. Thomas Asplund

Again the adversary strikes
Echoing the voice of warning
Out across our plowed fields
The adversary takes the morning.

Sun moves high
Eat the bread of bitterness
But by evening
Those who are afraid of dark.

Curriculum Vitae

by Charles Thomas Asplund

 

Curriculum vitae.  The words snarl and snap like dogs’ teeth—baring and tearing into the body.  No, that’s not it.  It’s more precise and willful.  Like a polite surgical knife.  Like lying naked and cold on a doctor’s examining table, separated from yourself.  All that you are used to hiding is there and the nurse might walk in.

 

My wife could add that I’m the kind of man who doesn’t count his change.

“I am like a posted post-card…”
by Charles Thomas Asplund (between March 28 and June 12, 1985)

I am like a posted post-card.
I have a sense of completeness
And a sense of dread at how small is the
endeavor, in the end.
Is it all a dreadful meal that gives
no satisfaction
But dulls the joy of anticipation—
The thrill of hunger.

“I no longer have my ticket to the circus…”
by Charles Thomas Asplund (between March 28 and June 12, 1985)

I no longer have my ticket to the circus
Decalled
White
RSVP
Disintegrated through neglect or overuse
or it went through the washer.
Never mind
Performers get in free.

“Now the days are fair and fulsome…”
by Charles Thomas Asplund (between March 28 and June 12, 1985)

Now the days are fair and fulsome
Now that the flying ants fly
Around our fat hedge.
And I can find melted pears
Falling from fondled branches

“Easter lilies in the foyer…”
by Charles Thomas Asplund (between March 28 and June 12, 1985)

Easter lilies in the foyer
The fern stand in the hall.
A mum pot by the sofa
Straw flowers on the wall.

The world was meant for growing things
And each must have a place