We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Open Hearth

by Shane Murphy

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $7 USD

     

  • Buy Physical Album

1.
Hyacinth, a thrown discus has left you bleeding --The West Wind, he set it off course. Hyacinth, from your spilled blood I fashion my garden and The West Wind upends you at the source. Bait me on a silent spring. The martins move to let me bring you this, the spondee of my hands, a cove about your face: the soft water.
2.
Thick air in my lungs: my demons work bellows from my shoulder or the shoreline, wherefrom I measure horizons. Hide and seek: with gods as my witness, I'll be deeper than the shallows. I stare at the sun with kaleidoscope-blinking. I've a short-sighted vision: you're hooked, lined; we're sinking.
3.
Ten square chains and a home of pine: I want a simple understanding of work, of love, of a child in a cradle, some fiddle before our bones bed for night, and the trunnels offset to brace our anchor beam. A thousand square chains and your hand in mine: I want a simple understanding of fields, of rain, of a horse and bridle, a kettle to steam the cold panes of night, and a well-rehearsed bend toward sleep for tired eyes. Hearts unchained and your hand in mine: I give you, darling, a simple understanding of wants, of warmth, of our lives well-cradled, a treadle to move our love day and night, and the purest of springs to cleanse the water downstream.
4.
Attention turned to the pasty moon Always the same clay face I have seen St Anne in dapple-gray light with palms Out as though nudging us forward When the cold pulsed like a blister Deep water is a psalm we lean toward As ancestors certain only of its mystery Champlain's small waves crumble like gypsum On the rocks Where founders stabbed The earth with bronze crosses and votive Deity We took it all in stride From stone patriots to Mary with a flickering Wick at her bare feet She is guarded She was sculpted with a constellation Of blemishes on her forehead And her eyes and how many others Made the Mohawks fear that island *** I remember it now in chiaroscuro Above the stampede of clouds in winter I spent an hour on the atlas Of the tarmac where the final wet Stains of the season bid me adieu Here six miles high in degenerate sleep The prattle the polite turbulence the sense That I'm lifting toward heaven toward something new With a gusty voice with silence Toward a heaven cherub-heavy And its host of floury bodies Oh let me not rise before the sun The universe I eat I drift The universe is roe with globs of stiff butter We do our best to prick it with airplanes We wonder what color blood snakes through it We cling to fantasy in dreams for fear Of waking empty *** There is a home I imagine Its cobblestone path is crumbly with wear It is anywhere There is rubble on TV Phone wires outside are crow-bent and crowbars Pry screeching nails from the shingled roof As from a casket And doesn't the sun Rise white as cream there Isn't it a dimple On the delft face of sky I will go Again to Isle La Motte and touch my hand Against the storm-licked shrine whose blood Is thicker than Champlain's and mine And whoever is there on the island In her own sad eternity with a worked smile Protecting nothing any longer But praying still that we thank Her
5.
The brick is fastened to mortar. I am attic-bound, witnessing spring fall. I can't recall what about your absence has shocked me to write again. I have stared for days on end at squirrels nosing through skidder-tracks, where needles stormed from the felled front-yard spruce. And here, though in bed by ten, the town wriggles at the first licks of spring. At Mulberry and Chestnut my brain presses on like a trawling motor, the familiar hum silence can no longer do without.
6.
Prism 02:15
We waited all night long for the sky to open and sparkle our fast crown of water ice. Dear prism, if the sun allows, I'm awash in your colors. I'm afire with this vow: There is nothing I want more than to break bread with an artist's hands. And if they be yours, may earth, air, fire, and water command the stars to assent, my heart to warm.
7.
Stay on the shore, dear one; the wake could overturn you. The soft ripple of a dorsal fin in this cove; the cove the cupped hands of a god at his shaving mirror; the sky bent well in an Archaic smile. Dear one, do you while away hours in song, like a warbler? Your tremolo, sweetest tremolo, brings a storm, brings shipwrecked sailors to your port.
8.
Another Time 03:31
9.
Small white petals in the wind, and sidewalks mosaicked with samaras from the maples, and footprints, and music: a merganser-spotted pond on a bleak Sunday. When you move like first light through the blinds, I am at peace. When you move like first light through the blinds, you warm me like a memory. The faithful file into church in well-pressed white blouses. They up and leave, they smile, they share God in upscale white houses.
10.
There's a ghost in the window with vacant eyes, white in the twilight, corset-pinched and blighted by the downpour. In the hallway I have seen you in your white lace. In the hallway I sit for your soft piano serenade. While the last one home slams the door, we separate like plaster from lath. Angel-winged Canada geese and I have stayed north this winter. Dawn breaks like porcelain; with clipped wings, to the soil I am tethered. In the hallway I have seen you in your white lace. In the hallway I sit for your soft piano serenade. While the last one home slams the door, we separate like plaster from lath. Come in, then, have a seat, I have saved some soup for you. Be the tureen empty I will share my eyes with you. When the last one home slams the door, don't let's separate like plaster from lath.
11.
Idle Hours 01:50
Neither silence nor the dark bend of light through the blinds can harrow my wide-eyed hours. As you rest in the young dawn, I resist the cold landscape from which these panes were made to protect us. Wake and melt away the ice. Neither birdsong nor the animal bedlam outside in the trees can torture you out of your sleep. As the waves of sheets turn you like beach-glass, the cold landscape's my refrain; and if nothing protects us, ...
12.
Sidle away the way I taught you. And savor mistakes, the salt of the earth, the sweat of desire: upon what but those ruins could you erect higher altars? The door is braced with luggage of divorce: typical garments of temporal longing. For the fourth time in a week, the well water froze; gabardine-decked men arrived in the driveway, with Jesus billowing from pamphleted pockets. They spouted the power to splice fraying hearts, but their passionate rhetoric could not soothe love, could not write those hearts into the scriptures of sleep. So much depends upon the umbilical tug, the restless voyage home, the want and eisegesis of reunion. So much--lost in the furrowed brow, the disapproval, the wheels forced to turn.
13.
With all-too-familiar bones you rattled around-- a shattered hip, some slipped gears. Then, just hummingbirds eye-level in a makeshift home, hospital-cozy, with red shag, bedpans, a throat full of stories. Old age seems a troubled childhood: the birds we dream of being, we become--caged and lonely. Death is for the birds. I sweep the stairs and my eyes of pollen. I beckon spring to nest here, with its hummingbirds and a makeshift god. May the earth be cozy. The topsoil in my hand is a fistful of memory.
14.
Since it was all to come to this the graying green patina of the failing season labored breathing the night tremors arms wild and flailing Go then now to savor the earth though it be so cold this time of year

about

For Jeremy E. Drake, 1944-2010.

credits

released February 1, 2011

All songs copyright 2011 Shane Murphy except "Another Time" (copyright Thomas D. Rapp)

Mixed, mastered and produced by Joe Phillips for WildCat Records.

Cover painting by Kira LaRose.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Shane Murphy Poughkeepsie, New York

contact / help

Contact Shane Murphy

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Shane Murphy, you may also like: