Life's refrains …

… Forgotten Poems #36: "The Three Callers," by Charles Swain.

I went for a walk this afternoon as I was thinking about this poem, one of those urban winter dusk walks that Virginia Woolf wrote about in her essay "Street Haunting," with lights coming on in windows and the sense of countless lives going on around us. I noticed the color of the sky, the flashing or blinking lights on the fronts of bodegas and delis, the sound of sirens, a small excitable dog tied up outside a grocery store and barking its head off. I was also thinking about a concert I went to last night (Jonas Kaufmann, a tenor of whom I'm becoming a fan, singing Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin at Carnegie Hall), and about how my mind kept flitting back and forth: trying to see over the head of the tall man in front of me; getting caught up in the music; looking at the translations of the songs in my program; thinking I should learn German for music-appreciation purposes; being amazed that I was getting to hear a singer whose voice makes me quiver with emotion but who rarely comes to New York; getting caught up in the music again; etc. etc. etc. Maybe there's no getting away from perceiving yourself perceiving what's happening. Or maybe there's a constant tension between that and not perceiving.