If you're in Toronto during the day tomorrow, I hope you will attend the latest performance of the song cycle "Waypoints," lyrics by yours truly, scored by Erik Ross, sung by Phillip Addis, accompanied on piano by Emily Hamper.
I read The Dark Is Rising
to my son.
Outside, the dark has risen with
passionate
intensity and weak light
contends to gain
conviction. The falcon veers back
late,
alights upon her master's sleeve;
rooks
gather and agglutinate; an
unseasonal
skein of geese thrums south,
wing-
beats synced to distant drums.
Meanwhile
the centre holds. And holds. And
mutters
its appeasing song: We are better
than this, we will not be brought
low, we must
save our strength for the fights
that matter
most. But the darkness is upon
us, son,
and throngs midwinter's gibbous
moon.
If that search for the rhyming sound to end your line with, that clink that locks the rhyme in, isn't a true search, i.e. if it doesn't send the shaft down to the deepest level this poem you're working on can live at, deeper than you could have reached without this self-imposed rhyme-search, then you stopped digging too soon, you accepted a word merely because it rhymed, it simply slid into place without making anything new happen; and if this occurs even twice, no, even once, your poem's probably already dead in the water, it's already, flottaison blême et ravie, lost to human sight.
