only better

My nephew trains with a circus group. This is a picture of him from their show last week. First-person reports are that this particular action, low-casting, feels "like flying, only better." What I love about this picture is that it captures him in flow, that elusive state we enter and exit in physical performance, that never comes when we seek it. Look at him, totally focussed, totally intense, but absolutely chill, absolutely inside his action.

What to say about the last two months: the real miracle of life is that we can periodically live in the comforting illusion that we are not spinning wildly through space, planets and fire rushing past our heads. Lately it's like some filter has failed and there's more tragedy and glory about than is easy to bear, lives shaken to the core by joy and sorrow at every turn. A new baby. A senseless, random murder. An important debut. A tragic accident. Packing up apartments and moving to other countries, other continents, for money, for love, for another chance. Graduations. First words. Goodbyes.

These things are going on everywhere, all the time, but when there's a cluster near your own head, in your own extended family, it feels significant. That's an illusion. But look, there are your friends, very real, all around you in mid-air.

My sister pointed out the other people in this picture: the instructor with hands extended; another student swinging in the opposite direction, about to fly; another instructor waiting to receive that student; the spotter below, ready to help if necessary.

There are so many ways to learn how to live. Sometimes at the piano and sometimes on my bike, I can escape the dream of solid ground. What a miracle can sometimes be possible, with assistance and protection: within the confines of our human body to discover what we really are, to fly, in spite of fear to reach out with confidence and faith.

dkz

AM

AM

Summer Sundays when I was ten,

I’d sneak downstairs to the new stereo.

The sky was bright, the sun still hidden

behind the neighbor’s house.

I folded my knees against the brief morning chill 

and kept the volume at a whisper,

used the dial like a scalpel:

a squinch to the right, another,

straining to parse the loopy static.

With time I heard the pops and whines

as a jabbering crowd, and I’d choose

a voice, coax it into the room,

listening, listening, tuning again, 

newly, fanatically patient. 

First triumph, tinny music (Marty Robbins). But then:

when I found the big news station from Chicago - Chicago! - 

I gasped and kept my hand on the dial.

Once I heard country music from Oklahoma 

and once a very faint preacher in Nebraska.

This only lasted for a magic hour or so

before the local air began to stir,

Minneapolis muscling in 

with hog futures and weather.

I kept my secret, 

this sacred this time before the light, 

and as the everyday world returned

I knew the way beyond it 

was at the edge of my hearing. 

dkz

diagnosis

The cardiologist is looking at us strangely because we are staring at him, my sister and mother and I. There is silence where he expected something else - cheers? smiles?

He clears his throat. I mean, it's the most boring echo I've heard today. His heart's in great shape.

Between us, my father slumps in his wheelchair, oxygen tube hooked behind his ears, fragile arms covered in bruises from the falls.

Annie speaks deliberately. We're surprised, you see, because his doctor told us he was dying. Days or weeks.

My father's expression does not change. There are toast crumbs on his sweatpants.

Oh, I don't dispute that. But it's not his heart that's causing his lungs to fill up. You say he's on dialysis?

The doctor flips through my dad's paperwork. He's never seen it before.

I'm not a kidney guy, but geez that's a lot of fluid. He raises his voice to my dad. Bill, are ya getting too much sodium? The food in those nursing homes is always too salty. How much coffee are ya drinking?

My sister continues to ask deliberate, reasonable questions. It's only later that I'll know she felt like I did, that she wanted to scream at the strange doctor talking about valves while being totally unaware that my dad's in end stage renal failure, absolutely unaware that his transplant from thirteen years ago is in the last stages of shutdown. Oh yah, you betcha, he's dying, but it's not his heart, those valves look great.

Is it too much to ask that these doctors have a conversation? The heart guy, the kidney guy, the generalist in our little town? There he sits with his paper, his specialty, his one little answer.

My father, the oxygen, the sweatpants.

My family, another collection of silos across the wide prairie, jealously guarding our stores, disconnected.

We do: driving, calls to the bank, careful questions to the doctor, reminiscing about good times, birthday cake with the grandchildren. We ask about his favorite songs and if there is anyone who should know.

There is no plan. I guess we aren't set up for that either. Scattered, we gather around a disappearing man, each with a separate desire and fear, asking and forgetting to ask. A man without a family, there is no one to know him in his entirety, only a million shards we try to reassemble.

Maybe if we keep trying. Maybe it will be enough.

dkz

Transition

We started walking across the marshy grass to the Retirement Center in fourth grade. Our tiny church was already bursting at the seams in the early seventies from the influx of families either heading toward the small colleges or away from the increasingly complicated cities. The smaller kids could stay in the church for Sunday school, and I envied them for being closer to our parents, the coffee urns, the plates of cookies, the piano and the red hymnals and everything else I loved about Bethel. The patch of undeveloped land between the buildings had a sidewalk part of the way, but then there was the small stretch where your new grown-up heels might sink into the soft earth, threatening to unbalance you, or where spring mud would cling to your pant leg on Easter Sunday, unavoidable muck on your way to the door.

We had our Sunday school classes in a big open area that smelled of food and medicine, at once antiseptic and sweet. Sometimes we sang and the residents gathered, tiny bundles between their wheelchairs and walkers. Some of them smiled as limp and welcoming as old blankets, some stared at invisible scenes, some were drawing near invisibility. At some point I wondered if that was the bargain, some interaction with us in exchange for use of the space. I loved Sunday school but that room bothered me, imagining as I did that there was any choice about it.

There it is in the online video, new tables and chairs and curtains but the same trim halfway up the wall, sidewalks long completed outside the familiar windows (how they let the winter cold in!). Relief floods the top level of my heart: Dad was successfully moved today, and now he will be safe. The last frightening fall in the apartment finally did it. Old soldier, old fool, he hung onto his own space for longer than was prudent, mistake, motivation. Gratitude takes root in the middle of my heart: to him, for finally saying yes, to my brother and sister for helping, to my mom who has done so much more than I realized.

But I haven't spoken with any of them yet, as they've been doing the real work, signing the papers and moving the furniture and letting him chat out his anxiety inside the new walls. I Skype instead with the man whom I still see as her new husband. Is it ten years already? And longer than that, his young family once also part of the little congregation, his son crossing the marshy grass with my sister and me. Something about this combination of things on my screen - the familiarity and strangeness of his face, of those rooms- gets to the bottom of my heart.

I see him through the window in the video, him with his vibrant wife before her long sickness changed and took her. There is my mother impossibly beautiful in her big glasses. Maybe it's spring, and they are out in front of the church after Adult Forum. The pastor with his green stole is there, and the choir director, my teachers, they are all in their leisure suits and macramé vests holding styrofoam cups of coffee and laughing, little kids around their knees like bees or electrons. I can see my father, even at this distance I can see his gestures and hear his voice full of opinion and drive. We middle kids are crossing the pathless field on our way back to them, and there they are, strong and vital, the parents who protect us and and the adults we long to become. The old people are behind me, there is mud on my shoes, and I am crossing back into their world, where everything is possible.

Unterwegs

One saxophone and two guitars in the corner, the face of their master in my iMac. Cold night outside my windows, he's backlit by sun as we talk. A whole family of friends takes their turns saying hello. We are laughing, enjoying the taste and joke of language. a clutch of Schrödinger's Katzen, in two places at once.

Something has shaken loose, something has opened. MtMn is already in America and the apartment is spacious, lonely and sweet. a small portal that is just like life. Through the streets and rehearsal halls of this town, speaking words that succeed and fail to convey what I intend, this life is exactly as it has always been.

I am at home here, I will never belong here. This is the essence of being human. Blessings on all who can know this without traveling and on all who must travel to understand. Wednesday I travel to another version of home, to the embrace of familiar friends, and I will miss this apartment, these streets. And other friends and other streets.

What a privilege, what a gift, this ache.

dkz

resolved

I love New Year's Resolutions. It is very much the style to dis them, or to talk about making "real" ones so that you avoid disappointment and failure. I have read several articles on this topic over the last few days. Don't set those big, unbounded goals, like losing weight or quitting smoking, because you are bound to disappoint yourself. Make it manageable, some simple daily goal that you know you can achieve.

Now this is very sensible, to choose something you can and will actually DO. In fact, are not the small daily steps the road to the big, unbounded goal? Seems kind of...obvious...but in any case, yes, bravo, set the easy-to-meet criteria and get going, put one foot in front of the other und so weiter.

But can I just raise my hand and say a few words in defense - nay, in FAVOR - of disappointment and failure (sigh. Are we really grown so afraid of these things)?

I'm an unabashed believer in the big dream, and I believe not on faith but on evidence. Brothers and sisters, I have seen people reinvent their lives over and over again. People start businesses. People quit drinking. People get married, have children, create art, move to new cities, speak in foreign tongues, and then they throw everything in their life up in the air and try something new. They set their sights on a prize far off, and then they move.

And yes, small daily steps are part of that journey. But so are the long vision, the dare, the jump off the cliff into the unknown. And so are failure and disappointment.

One of the many great things that performing can teach you is this: error is part of learning. We spend all kinds of time in practice rooms learning our music. And then, when we start staging rehearsals, all kinds of musical mistakes get made. As new information comes in, and as new skills are put together, details get temporarily dropped. It's not a clean process. The messiness is part of the learning - it IS the learning.

Performers screw up. Parents do too, children, friends, colleagues, everybody. You resolve to do something and then you don't do it. But are you maybe just in the middle of learning how?

It's a new, shiny year, which is of course just a made-up boundary. Make yourself some promises and dream yourself some dreams, and don't misunderstand success to be something so small that a little momentary heartbreak can kill it. Get out there and mess something up, cry over the spilled milk. There is such reward waiting over there, past whatever boundary you've made up, wherever you imagine is too far.

dkz

Kinds of Blue

Freezing fog, gorgeous from my window, shrouds the glowing city. The Stefansdom spire lost in the mist, the unlit Christmas lights strung over the Kärntnerstrasse, the steps to the Albertina painted like the Monet waterlilies, everything blurs in the watery air. People are wrapped in down coats with furry hoods, or maybe they didn't plan and so hurry by with their hands shoved in their pockets and their scarves wrapped high over their ears. I was in the latter group last winter, but now I'm strolling with the former, on my way home through the cold night, snacking on the icy air and still tasting the horn solos Paul dished out in the warm little club.

He played the blues tonight, a group of guys joyously rocking the tunes, laughing and smiling and joking the sad lyrics. "Glück im Unglück", said my colleague a few days ago, not speaking of the blues. She was talking about a friend jumping into the last opera in our Ring cycle. Too bad about the friend who had to cancel, but oh how glorious the substitute. She brought down the house (a little opera pun there for my geek friends). The orchestra was detailed and monumental, grand under the famous conductor, one of the best in the world, and we were all in the Loge to weep at the beauty of it and to cheer.

And since then I have felt a little sad. Not the scary sadness, but, well, blue. I met the beautiful substitute ten years ago, at another opera house. There was also a great orchestra there, under the leadership of a great conductor. The Rings I had the pleasure of working on there were life-changing for me. The first ones came when we were newish in New York, still missing Seattle but starting to get the hang of things. The community aspect of working on the Ring (Wagnerians are a clannish bunch) was such a part of becoming rooted in the city and in my job. That house, and that conductor, were an arrival point for me, a seminal part of my professional life. Now that era is coming to an end, as all eras must. But that's been just an idea to me. Something about being in the presence of another truly great Ring this week made the penny drop for me: the first important era of my grownup professional life is past.

Digging a bit deeper, past work, it's simpler: those people are still incredibly important to me, and I miss them. There's the second shade of blue tonight, passing my subway stop, turning onto my street, past the Apotheke, the Altwaren shop, the Mittelschule, in other words, my neighborhood.

Home. A complex little word, that.

It's easy to identify the stresses of moving. Everything's new: the job, the apartment, the people, the language, the habits. Learning all the new info is hard. But there's another part. I believe some of that first year suffering is your whole self dragging its feet as you try to adjust, denying and refusing the whole way, because it knows better than you that you're about to lose something.

My new Ring family made me long for the old one. Jazzland tonight made me miss the OK Hotel. Siggy's guitar playing makes me hear Ken. Glasergasse in the cold is so far away from the warm nights on Thornton Road.

Vienna is full of friends and familiarity and warmth now, but that means that another set of relationships and loves has receded. I've done this before, and I know that I get to keep more than I lose. But tonight, turning my key in the lock of my door, entering my home at the end of a day filled with people and music, I hope it does no disservice to anyone here if I allow myself a cup of tea and a slightly melancholy blogpost. So much other music and so many other people are on my heart.

dkz

Cover

That side of the house is cold because of the sun. It shines on the roses out back. In the kitchen you can stand on your toes and see him in the the garden, gently pruning, turning the blossoms this way and that. Otherwise they won't grow, she says, or at least not be so pretty. I don't really understand how it works, she says, and takes the warm bread out of the oven.

The electric blanket is because of the bedroom on the cold side. You have to shut the door because of her snoring, so the rest of the house can't share the warmth. In the city they didn't have the extra space, but now we can take turns visiting. There is a strange odor when the blanket heats up in the cold room, but it isn't dangerous.

Don't we take care of you, he says. He is not afraid of bees. I don't go near the roses. They are fragrant in the light, tied to their stakes.

In the living room we watch TV, the Clancy Brothers on Johnny Carson. Past bedtime, she says. Don't tell your folks, he says. The room is warm and rich, bread and whiskey and pipe tobacco. His smile, her gentle early dozing. The song from the old country. The national anthem.

I don't know how to refuse the electric blanket's oppressive, heavy spell. I unplug it in the dark, secretly, to spare their feelings, but of course by then it is too late.

dkz

Rheinlegendchen

Tonight I sat in the dark as Stephen Gould, Christian Thielemann, and the Vienna Phil brought the Forging Song to brilliant life. Fire flamed up and flickered in the orchestra, metal glared, the maestro coolly held the forces in hand so that the tenor could ride the waves with gusto. "Ho hei!" sings the tenor, while hammering away at the newly forged Nothung, the sheer joy and effort of his work taking him beyond language into pure music.

Wagner brings out the hammers when there's work to be done. Rheingold's Donner (Thor, really, but in this story a much less awesome god than Wotan), eager to dispel the confusion left by Alberich's curse, gathers the winds to him with a "Heda, hedo" before he deals his thunderous Schlag. In the second act of Meistersinger, Hans Sachs  is also moved to nonsense syllables and hammer blows as he tries to take care of business. "Jerum, jerum, hallo hallo he!" he cries, whatever that means, slogging away over a pair of shoes and drowning out a troublesome rival. 

The act of working itself lifts the characters out of their lengthy Wagnerian discussions into an act rhythmic, repetitive, and purely melodic, unbound by syntax and meaning. The exertions of labor seek and find their release. Some of Wagner's characters are part magical, pure expressions of nature, and their voices leave human hammerstrikes behind to dwell in a deep world of mysterious meanings. Their syllables bear no explanation, nor do they need one. The Rheinmaidens in the water, the Valkyries in the air call to us as the birds or the wind called to us in childhood, when we could still understand everything. Weia, wala, heia, hoyotoho. Siegfried will later drink dragon's blood and understand the woodbird's speech, but in the Forging Song he is on his way, a lumbering, powerful bird himself with his wordless song. 

Good, honest, simple work, the way to bliss, one seamlessly connected to the other. It is that easy...until the neighbors spill out into the chaotic street, until you put in on the wrong shore. Because, legends teach us, beauty and peril dwell together, the search will lead you astray, and dark oblivion will mask itself in a friend's chalice or a sweet song. The pull of desire, the gleam of the gold - are these the real treasure, found at last? Is it your true love calling to you, or is it Lorelei?

Where is your wisdom? 

The strong work of rowing the boat slows and calms to a gentle rocking. It feels so like the good release after honest exertion. Is it not the same, have you not earned it? You notice your own face reflected in the waves, more beautiful than ever.

Stay with me. Whose voice calls you?

The oars are idle at your side. Can you still decide to pick them up again? 

Halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin. 

Oh, Lorelei will take you down to the bottom of the river, and you will want to go.

Wehe, wehe. 

Nights like these, in the darkened theater, the Rhein swirls up at me from out of the orchestra pit, takes me, drowns me. I know it's not Lorelei, because I know her song. I'll never take the journey without sharpening my gaze into the blackness, scanning the shore for danger. But the journey, yes, absolutely, above all things: for the navigation, for the work, for the wordless joy.

Weia, leia, hei ha. 

dkz

3 years

Ring, November 1

Vollendet das ewige Werk.


Now that we are building our own little Valhalla out in Texas, I have a moment of kinship with Wotan as he intones these words tonight. I hear his sentence mundane and literal for the first time, the stress and strain and hope and ambition involved in creating a castle. Of course, the giants are the ones doing the labor, and there arises the complicated question of ownership. What did you do, and what do you believe you have earned? Wotan and the giants each demand, offer, and accept unreasonable reward, reward that is not theirs to give or receive - a beautiful goddess, youth, and the gold they've heard about from the Rhein. So the story begins in theft and deception, every god for himself.  Wotan wants power, Fricka wants Wotan, and they imagine that Valhalla will bind these things to them, or the gold will, or surely something will - but their doubt runs through the whole piece. Give it up, they say to each other, the gold or the girl, but that is the hardest thing to do.

Herrliche Wohnung, wonniger Hausrat, sollten dich binden zu säumender Rast.


Outside the theater, it is All Saints', and people are buying flowers and taking the trams to the cemeteries. There are the former citizens of Wien, Vienna, Vinobodna, in houses no more permanent than any built on earth or in the clouds. It's different in death, though, when the hands have opened and have had to let go. No one fights over the house. Flowers are brought, and poems, and balloons, and toys, and they say, this space belongs to us still.

Was mächtig der Furcht mein Mut mir erfand.


This morning, over coffee, I did some more work on my family tree, pages of my dead. I love the narrative of my immigrant ancestors. Piecing together the patchy stories left to us, I can build a sense of what these people gave to me - of course, that's not what they imagined they were doing. They did unreasonable things, crazy things, in the service of acquiring something bigger, grander, different. The terrible crossing, the backbreaking labor, the foreign language, the scarcity: when plenty began to arrive, it felt earned, deserved. Then the questions. What have you done, what do you imagine you have earned? Often they fought and broke off relations forever, over gold, over the goddess. 


Denn was nur lebt, will lieben.


My own dead are near me today. Grandma Alice, you've been gone almost a year. You helped me build my house. Little Halen, you gave us so much in such a brief time, you floored me with the devastating generosity you brought out in your family. I know where you are, under the tree in Northfield, next to Ralph at Ft. Snelling, in the beautiful Valhallas of my beloveds' hearts and minds. 


Alles, was ist, endet. 


Inside the theater, a beautiful woman rises out of the earth, her daughters call from the depths of the Rhein. Give us back what is ours. 


The treasure does not belong to you.

Open your eyes. Both of them.

dkz

L.

I ran from Alcina rehearsal to the small club in the eighteenth district. T. was only in town for one night. We had so many great nights when we were all together in New York, but our ties go back to college in Arizona. As T. blisters through his horn, I am in touch with both of those lives at once. New York always feels close, Arizona much less so. 


"Did you guys hear about L.?"T. likes to play Old Home Week with us, which is funny because he is kind of famous. We love it, the updates on gigs and breakups and kids.

We hadn't heard about L. "He's in jail."

Third floor Coke machine, L holding court as usual with a brace of other saxophone players. I cut through the cigarette haze with my 35 cents, looking for my mid-morning caffeine. They are laughing insiders, I'm embarrassed and shy surrounded by these older guys. L is drawing a robot-man in RayBans, holding a soprano saxophone, mouth open in horror: the senior recital poster of the silent long-haired person who is not yet MtMn. 


At home later, I begin a Google search that ends far too quickly; the name and the city instantly yield pages of gut-freezing print and video documentation. The internet spreads the small story over endless sites, a tornado blowing a house across an entire county: Former band teacher sentenced to fifteen years.

The music in my day is all Alcina, keeping our house covers in form. This is athletic music that one has to train regularly. The hours of fine-tuning pitch, coloratura, rhythm, and text are difficult and rewarding. A long line of music geek friendships extends behind this day of Handel. I remember rehearsing with L. A great musician, personally strange, like so many of the people I have known. Like me.  

I have not thought about him in so long. We both stayed in college for an age. We were never friends, but we saw each other nearly every day for eight years. We played music together on multiple occasions. He has a wife and children of his own. A tornado, a house blown apart.

Hey, I say to my sister, I think I know your student band teacher. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the universal junior high expression of dismissal. 
Mr. L? He's weird. I don't like band anyway. 


"You know the sabbatical semester when L. taught the studio?" T. drinks water these days, like me, graying hair around his strong dark face. "He made the most crazy-ass technical exercises for me, broken sixths all up and down the horn and shit like that. It was all because he couldn't stand my sound, but I tell you...he pushed me. I do all kinds of stuff on the horn because of him." T laughed, short and dry, and we all looked at each other.

Alcina is a sorceress that turns her lovers into beasts. A courageous wife rescues her enchanted husband from Alcina. There is the magic of a certain kind of love, and it is an illusion. The hero, Ruggiero, has a hard time understanding what is illusion and what is real. 


We walk home through the streets of Vienna and talk about how he always seemed like a big kid. Later, the stooped shoulders under the prison uniform, the small angry eyes. I search them far too long for evidence of someone I never knew. And yet his constant presence through our Arizona days brings them back more sharply in my mind than many more familiar triggers.

L. and I are buying Buster Bars at the DQ across the street from the music school. We try to eat them before they melt as we walk down Mill Avenue to his new studio. He and a friend are renting teaching space and doing instrument repair. I'm accompanying a small recital of his students, and he is also playing. MtMn and I will soon leave for Germany for my Fulbright year. I imagine that these days of study, of learning, of trying things out, will somehow never end. We finish our ice cream and rehearse his piece, a piece I heard MtMn play in my first week of college, a piece I accompanied T. on as he forced himself through his required classical recital. Tomorrow we will play it for L's students, for the kids who want to play as well as he does. 


I want to weep, for him, for his family, for his kids, and above all for the four other children. In fifteen years, they will be as old as we were when we played music, went to the DQ, drew recital posters, extended our childlike pursuits toward adulthood and wondered what would happen.

Ruggiero looks around the stage and sings,
Green meadows, pleasant groves, you will lose your beauty.
You will see loveliness changed to horror. 


dkz

Philip Levine, brand new Poet Laureate

(congratulations to the writer)

WHAT WORK IS

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

tempo

There is a small group of elementary schoolchildren practicing unison drumming in the playground across the street from this small apartment. MtMn practices Robert Johnson in the living room as I look back into the magic Web (did all my friends have fun at play?); my eyes, filled with a week´s worth of mountain and sea and sky, are dazzled again by pictures and stories that happened without their knowing. The seagulls cry in the setting sun, the salt air wafts in through the windows of our friend´s childhood bedroom.

It´s the usual time of rediscovery, loosed briefly from the sweet obligations of music-making, time-keeping, story-telling. What is rediscovered: music, time, story. Parts of life endure and others do not, strangers will take you in, words are everything and nothing in the same moment.

Sometime in the last weeks of hospitality, I got properly lost again. It was the food in our kitchen or the food in a family´s kitchen, or a friend´s, or a stranger´s. It was our bed or another´s. It was the familiar road or the unknown trail, the rain or the brilliant sun, the eloquence or the struggle for a single word. Non importa, Wurscht, whatever. Mountain, sea, sky.

The trick now is to come back home, magic mirror in hand, and stay lost.

dkz

northfield july 12

at some point, the suitcase,
the old car packed blind,
the headlong tumble out of the tree
before the updraft and the sky.

after this, all glory, all beauty,
boredom of days and the heart's unease,
the long ballad written in blood.

the nest remains on the branch,
the old house on the same street.
you think you know that place,
but you can not discover it
in ten thousand things.

dkz

lake orion july 5

What is up with the purple martins?
One stands before their tall house and dances a funky circuit:
tail twitch, head left, wing shrug, repeat.
While his neighbors begin their raucous commute,
three silent geese converge on the dock.
The weightless sparrows blown aloft
chatter and panic in the still-black oak.
Waves lap the spreading warmth;
a distant boat whines low across the water.
The small island you swam to with your brothers is sinking:
the westernmost tree uprooted in the weekend storm
hangs tilted, a feast below its swinging roots,
a dogeared page in the lake's long history.
The soft air exhales its soft breath.
Queenly light advances on the water's face, on the trees,
edgeless grey sharpens to yellow-green, ice-blue,
promising purple and scarlet,
a guarantee of night.

dkz

the world is, the world is

48 hours ago, entering the Staatsoper for the final Katja.
36 hours ago, sleepy in a cab following the canal south toward the airport.
24 hours ago, somewhere over the icebergs, in between the Heathrow layover and the long drive out of Chicago.
12 hours ago, laughter and embraces in MtMn's childhood home.
Just now, in the truck driving to Starbucks in search of caffeine and Internet.

I parked among the other shoppers, who were laden with beer and hot dogs and chips and everything for the fireworks display tonight. People glanced up at the heavy skies, hoping the storms would pass quickly. I put the truck in park and the radio was saying,

"No his mind is not for rent
To any god or government
Always hopeful, discontent,
He knows the changes aren't permanent"

But change is.

dkz

Out of Office Reply

I wanted to take a picture of it in the fading light as I looked back through the open door. Computer screen installing updates, strangely clean desk, a few demure scores on the piano. My camera battery was used up in Budapest, though, and my arms were full of presents and my black suit jackets and a few folders of music and my bag. So I locked the door and walked across the plaza, looking up at my windows.

Last show, goodbyes, hugs, giddiness. I am no longer new. Screw you, Everest, I'm standing on you.

And of course, the boundary is false. Other transitions continue all around me. A wedding, a funeral, the first words of a foreign language, an anniversary, breakfast, lunch, haircut, Tuesday The wide, wide world.

There's so much more to tell, but the office is closed.

Schönen Sommer wünsch ich euch allen!

dkz

signs and portents

In the last 48 hours I have

- helped a cashier to her feet after she was shoved to the ground by a shoplifter, after helping another person keep said shoplifter from exiting the store,
- spent a weird five minutes during a first meeting with a new colleague trying to get the PIGEON that had flown through my open windows to fly back out again,
- had my sleep disturbed by extremely bizarre dreams, waking sure that there was someone in my room speaking to me, which of course was not the case.
What's up, universe?

dkz

Die Frist ist darn near um

Exactly one year ago today, freshly arrived in Vienna for an apartment-hunting visit,  I had brunch with new acquaintances FB and MStMB. We had been introduced on Facebook by a mutual pal (KGB, one of the world's nodal people, known and loved by all and with a talent for connection) and had never met face-to-face. I bought flowers on the street and just went right over to their house. Since then, I've spent a lot of time there, and so has MtMn, eating and drinking, listening to music, talking about film and music and TV and politics and language, laughing, crying, and then usually eating again.

One year ago this week, I was having meetings with strangers about an overwhelming amount of work in a language whose most primary colors were barely under my fingers. Since then, I've learned to be grateful every day for the generosity and energy - and talent to spare - of these colleagues. We have made a year of opera together in a very dramatic time of transition. We had a few triumphs, a few disasters, and many nights that ranged from undistinguished to excellent. A season like any other.

One year ago next week, I walked into this apartment. Here, I thought, which began a whole education in a variety of subjects including (but not limited to) banking, government, and how to talk to the cable guy auf Deutsch. We learned our new words for cleaning supplies, we learned to shop before Sunday, and we were happy to find out that IKEA is just about the same everywhere.

It hasn't quite been a year in Vienna, but one year ago today it all started to become real.

Last night I watched the third act of Walkuere out on the plaza, shoulder to shoulder with the crowd of people who stood silent and rapt as the music boiled down at them off the screen. I walked home in the warm night down the main street of the old city. In the Graben a solo cellist was playing Bach, and a small oasis had formed around him. A gelato parlor stayed open late, and people were eating cones and cups in the sticky summer air, listening quietly. I walked up the canal the rest of the way home, and the breeze was cool coming down the water from the north.

One year ago we didn't live here yet.

I wonder what June 2012 will be like.

dkz

death and the matron

I have wanted to go to the Zentralfriedhof since before I got to Vienna. The way it's shot in The Third Man is so beautiful, and it is even more beautiful in real, um, life. Even the cemetery here is elegant.

Life, of course, intervened after I got here. More than once this year I've thought that the new job would be the death of me, but of course that's typical human hyperbole as I continue to be relentlessly alive and have failed to make the time to get to the outskirts of town and walk among the former Wieners. But today - today was perfect, sunny and mild, weather begging for a bike ride and body begging for distraction.

See, this week, these weeks, are full of news from friends all over, news of turmoil and upheaval. Some of it is joyous: marriage, new jobs, babies on the way, surprising endeavors. Some of it is frightening: changes in health, in employment, in the idea and picture of the future. Is it an especially stormy spring, or does the current constant glut of information make it seem so? The picture of the flood, the ruin, is ever before our eyes. I wanted to go walking in the cool green, lots of people, no conversation, imagining myself (as one always does in a new neighborhood) living in one of the newer homes.

This here is the Trusty Steed, which multiplied its daily commute by a factor of 4.5 today for this trip. She was a champ. Lord, it's a pleasure to ride the bikeways of Vienna, although I'm still a little tense on the busy streets where cars are closer than I'm used to. But most of the way even as far out as Simmering is designated bike paths, pleasant and safe. You can ride your bike around in the cemetery too, but I locked mine up at the entrance.

The entire place smelled incredible after the last two days of rain, fresh and green. It also smells often of roses, and there are bushes and vines of wild and cultivated roses on many graves. Some are totally overgrown with ivy, some of the statuary is falling down, some graves are hand-washed and carefully tended with new flowers and white rocks. There are Eastern European tombstones with photographs of people and cars. There is a section for babies with toys and pinwheels. I saw a family spading up earth there, and I could not take a photo of that. I remember my own family gathering around a small place in my hometown's soil, just large enough for the tiny box. So many things fell apart after that, so many things fell together. When I think of my own dead, the shades that seem closest, I still think of that day, of our angel.

And I think of Alice, of course, of my grandmother, who also tended roses in her own garden. I was mentally planning my summer trip and was looking for a good day to visit her when I remembered that of course, I wouldn't. She came to mind often as I saw the many tombstones that referred to "seine lieben Bergen" - his beloved mountains. That's a fairly common theme, city transplants calling up the memory of their Alpine homes at their place of final rest. Alice loved to be outside, and she loved to go back to New Ulm, to "the farm", or to be out on the lake.

This particular monument made me smile, knowing this town of literature, of learning, of law, of analysis. Was it the dead man who had trouble letting go of this world, his work, his opinions? Was it family? An admirer? patron? pushy engraver? Talk about getting the last word! There are so many fascinating works of art here, languid goddesses and strange busts and eerie death masks and oddly/brilliantly judged abstractions, along with plenty of grandiose religious statuary.

I spent a peaceful and inspiring few hours here, strolling on the dappled paths and thinking of the shifting sands everywhere. Then I hopped back on the Steed and headed home. Riding up the queenly broad path along the canal, the main artery that leaves town to the south hummed with cars to my left as trains and trams crossed the bridges over my head. My way was no less busy, packed with bikes and joggers, dogs and inline skater, strolling lovers and immoveable packs of tourists. Every artery of the city was flowing with its life's blood, its people, and we were all on our way in and out of Vienna's heart.

dkz