Unseat a Heart

Dear Readers,

I'll see if I can't reestablish something like a rhythm here. Unusually, I have a few things to report in addition to my existential wanderings and banal schadenfreude.

For instance: our song, "Chemistry," available over on the right, is going to be on a promotional CD called the Chill Out Acoustic Compilation, put together by some people who call themselves Quickstar Productions. You can listen to their previous efforts here - it seems like they produce an album of this sort every year or so (in addition to offerings in other styles).

We aren't completely sure of what to make of it. We got in touch with one person from a previous edition, Chelsea Carter, who we thought was good and who very kindly filled us in on her experience with Quickstar.

She, like us, seems unsure what to make of it. She felt like she was fairly treated and everything. So I guess we'll see what happens - and at least it was nice of Quickstar to want to include us. If you're interested in owning one of these, drop us a line and we'll send you one once they're ready. They'll be on iTunes, too.

In other news, Abbie is really good at painting. So far she specializes in fruit.

And finally, the road trip is 58 days away. Can you believe it? We can't.

Here's a little poem for you.



Romantics
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann


The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.


Lisel Mueller