For Philip Guston (II)
I let the evening sun stream in
through the living-room window
of the Western world
in pale instrumentations
In the sleeping/work room
Morton Feldman adapts to conditions,
to the position of the sun,
with For Philip Guston;
illuminates the room’s metal-scaled
chamber musicality
in harsh raw fine-cuttings; tooth twinges
and selfless skin contacts
within the vibrating sun-cadence of spatialities
on flute, alto flute, piccolo,
piano, celesta,
vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells;
carefully, honestly, truthfully,
without sideways glances or agendas,
while the potatoes boil massively
in the large pot
out in the kitchen;
spit sizzling water across the stove;
a state of being without noteworthy weight,
a clear conscience,
without need of divinity
of whatever kind it may be;
without the dragging ballast of forgiveness
My grown son’s and my
long bicycle ride
through the mid-Swedish landscape of May today,
through the transparency
of the late-spring freshness of the air
and life’s tempered emotional dispositions
brought us to the hill of Uppsa Kulle,
and up
onto the country’s third-largest burial mound,
where one of legend’s triad of kings rests
with a view across the mirrored waters of Lake Runnviken:
perhaps King Ingjald Illråde,
possibly King Rönne,
or conceivably King Östen
– and on the way home
through the wind and birdsong
of the gentle land
we stop
at the dwelling place of earliest childhood, Hagnesta,
layered within the photo albums from 1950–51
of my ninety-two-year-old brother Rolf
and the sun from the western tubular bellism
sounds causally chained
through my lives,
which stand layered against the horizon,
while the ears speak the S.E.M. Ensemble’s
Morton Feldmanese: fragile, sheer, proportional
through long timeless hours
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-05-18 at 21:57
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