Loch Music

I listen as recorded Bach

Restates the rhythms of a loch.

Through blends of dusk and dragonflies

A music settles on my eyes

Until I hear the living moors,

Sunk stones and shadowed conifers,

And what I hear is what I see,

A summer night's divinity.

And I am not administered

Tonight, but feel my life transferred

Beyond the realm of where I am

Into a personal extreme,

As on my wrist, my eager pulse

Counts out the blood of someone else.

Mist-moving trees proclaim a sense

Of sight without intelligence;

The intellects of water teach

A truth that's physical and rich.

I nourish nothing with the stars,

With minerals, as I disperse,

A scattering of quavered wash

As light against the wind as ash.

DOUGLAS DUNN

Pibroch: The Harp Tree

Pibroch, I make you a man

who could shake hands with Bach

and talk with him over a glass

of Rhenish wine.

You would walk in, with your sack

of images that are brightly dark and darkly bright,

and Bach, emerging from a labyrinthine fugue,

would greet you with warmth and pleasure. He’d pour

the Rhenish wine.

There’d be grave wings beating

in that room and happy silences

smiling to each other.

When you left, you’d return

to your crystal land of bogs and coloured rocks,

and Bach

would stretch his elbows sideways

like wings and fold them again and go back into

the labyrinth where he's never lost,

seeking, like you, the minotaur

that will crouch beside him

with his heavy horns,

with his beautiful, golden eyes.

NORMAN MACCAIG

Bach for the Cello

By mathematics we shall come to heaven.

This page the door of God's academy

for the geometer,

Where the pale lines involve a continent,

transcribe the countryside of formal light,

kindle with friction.

Passion will scorch deep in these sharp canals:

under the level moon, desire runs fast,

the flesh aches on its string,

without consummation,

Without loss.

ROWAN WILLIAMS

Homage to J. s. bach

It is good just to think about Johann Sebastian

Bach grinding away like the mills of God,

Producing masterpieces, and legitimate children –

Twenty-one in all – and earning his bread

Instructing choirboys to sing their ut re mi,

Provincial and obscure.