Quartet for Voices

David Capps
February 2023

Quartet for Voices (to be performed with one human voice reading each section, simultaneously)

I   A Voice from No Time in Particular

A halo of trees
rests in darkness,

life and laughter
arise in far hills,

campfire ablaze,
ashen faces ask

what does this
poem know—

Yet say bells
ring, and we

are universe,
and when light

goes out, and body
dies, intermure

mists, and cabin
overgrown

with moss. A pool
table. Green. Deer

leap in the kitchen
no longer kitchen

antlers felt light
switch. This house,

one body, One
among many.

A halo of trees
in darkness. All.

All this means—
a drawing of shades,

and paintings fallen
off the hook. Verse

as dust in layers
microbes feasting,

treffen und du frisst.
Yet this light resists.

Bodies are rooms
in houses, crevices

in cabins where
shades are drawn,

upon what self? That
one exists in time

or outside time
exist, and still

experience time as if
a poem’s as if? Golden

leaf rustle—hoof
combing rug—As if I could

find it there.
Wild geese search

overhead, frogs
abandon pursuit.

This lake went dry
centuries ago. Remnants

of a lodge remain.
A pool table. Felt.

Smoldering, ashen faces,
days as an integers

along the line
of natural numbers—

endless, isn’t it?
Streaming sunshine.

II   A Past Voice

Do you want to be
stripes or solids?

asked an angling cue
in dim lamp light.

What do you want
to be? Then that is

what you will be:
a solid something

in the shadows of
the forest king,

a striped someone
celebrated in light

of the hall. True, a hall
itself in transition

from being to being
something other,

a shape coming into
focus the way a cue

sharpens on chalk,
and all unconscious

decisions you make
are made.

III   A Voice that is No Where

The real genuflects,
backing its way

out cautiously I
that is the I tries I

and to see itself
recovering senses

in attempt to make
a room from the past:

steps from cinder,
green felt from moss.

The strange thing is,
I keep picturing

a hotel of separate
rooms, infinitely

many, whose lights
never turn off,

and I glimpse the
rooms facing mine,

as I look out across
a square courtyard,

rooms identical,
whose curtains close

with a pull when I
look up and yet

the light remains on,
tuned to experience

“eternal life” muttered
beneath its breath,

and my perception
swings there, as from

a lamp hanging over
the table, a soft Louis

XV green, malachite
of a public house.

IV   A Voice Closer to the Present

Drifting back, I find
murmurs of thistles.

Rain pours, and earth
lets loose a groan,

as if to ask who
lived here, should

I know. No one,
a member. A race.

Qualitative identity.
Once, someone set

a hammock. One
wrote a four part

fugue. Showing more,
surely. Quaff of

ideologues. Still,
even speech goes

to seed, Bach rot
infests the vine—then

can we salvage divine?
In thick white terror

flows a river.
Identity. Selves

self off, cobwebs
spun so gently mount

in attics. Others.
But song, fire, winds

esophageal, allergic
to the divine.

Reasons spill
severally, pine trunks

marred for the task,
and there I am,

seated in darkness
debilitating, the way

I began, and you,
present before void

and for birth yearning—
what stages—

I pause. For beyond
evolution, a state

of all times. Red
coral forming, tendrils

foraging, in provision.

◊

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming).