That's the first of the four.
And I'll read the fourth of the four.
"Glenn On Monk's Mountain."
"Glenn on Monk's Mountain" is actually a phrase from a novel
by the Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard.
It's called The Loser.
And it has to do with a character modeled
on Glenn Gould.
So the Glenn on Monk's Mountain, in that phrase,
is a reference to Glenn Gould.
And the Monk's Mountain is not a reference to Thelonious Monk,
but to a place in Strasbourg.
Glenn Spearman died at age 51, and Glenn Gould did as well,
and the book has much to do with that.
The book was actually given to me
by a friend as a birthday present for my 50th birthday.
And I'd also been in Vienna recently, so some of that
comes in.
"Glenn On Monk's Mountain."
"Next it was Austria we were in.
Unexpected rain soaked our feet, unexpected snow froze our feet.
A bitter book took us there.
A bitter book in our stomachs, an aftertaste on our tongues,
a book based on another Glenn, Monk's Mountain, not
the monks we took it for.
"A book of overlay, a book about death at 51,
a book we lay awake at night reading, a book we
read wanting to wake up from.
So it was another Monk's Mountain we haunted,
sat upside it cross-legged, lotus-headed, humped,
heads encased in crystal, it seemed.
"Bits of straw, like unexpected snow, filled the sky.
Stars were bits of straw blown about in the crystal we
were in.
The rags on our backs, a bolt of black star-studded cloth.
The jukebox dressed us in gabardine, burlap,
scratched our skin with raw silk.
A bit of straw caught in my eye made it water.
"Water filled my head with salt. Straw, ridden by water,
filled my head, my throat, my chest.
Salt filled my head with sound.
A sound of bells, not of bells, but of pounded iron.
The Falasha spoken to by Ogun
"I played Asaph, the horn's bell, a swung sensor,
wafted scent, the furtive sound I sought.
Liturgical ambush, fugitive straw, limbic ambush,
Nastic address.
Pads and keys cried out for climb, clamor, something
yet to arrive we called rung.
"Rickety wood, split reeds, sprung ladder,
more splinters the more steps we took.
Rung was a bow made of air, an unlikely plank
suddenly under our feet we floated up from.
Rung was a loquat limb, runaway ladder, bent,
miraculous branch, thetic step.
Flesh beginning to go like wax, we
sat like Buddha, breath and abiding chime.
Chimeless.
Bells had we been rung."