PARLANDO IT 2024

QUINTETTO
Per Antonio Lysy

I

Again.

Spirals of clay dust.
Sunflowers and thyme
By the strade bianche.

Sun-warmed wine.

Pizzicato and swallow-song,
Music and word.
Major arpeggio.
Minor third.

The birds whistle harmony
Over the cortile
As a deer in the forest
Stares up from the grass.

The music drifts out where it will.

Through the tunnels under Chiusi.
The spas of Chianciano.
The back lanes of Montepulciano.
The fields of La Foce.

Quavering solo,
Counterpoint and fugue
As Bach brings us homeward
By the zig-zag road.

II

First light on the vast amphitheatre
that is Val d’Orcia.
Silhouette of twin-belled turret
Of the castle so ancient
that no one remembers its purpose
If ever it was known.

The audience of birds start to chirrup and whistle
As the sun comes up like a russet-haired soloist.
A ladle thumps a milk bucket.

Begin.

Belvedere Grande.
Belvedere Piccolo.
The five-bar gate like a sheet of manuscript
waiting to be written.

Strings of moving lilies.
Brass of blowsy heat.
Bells, and a chime tree of tremulous breeze
Moves a cloud whose shade drifts upward, sailing
Out like an aria across the valley.
Woodwind as the heat oboes gently through the forest,
Through the arches of an aqueduct,
Built long ago.

Old ghosts on the battlements
Conducting the wheatfields
For everything longs to be music.

Little wonder
We say ‘air’ as one word for a melody.
Music, our breathing,
Our filling of the immensity.

The language in which God speaks.

III

Even the placenames sing.

Castiglione d’Orcia.
Montalcino.
Pienza.

San Quirico d’Orcia.
Bagno Vignoni.
Radicofani.

Castiglioncello del Trinoro.
Montefollonico.

The roadmap, a score for a string quintet.

The milestones, a procession of solos.

IV

Born ten thousand years ago
And born this living second,
From the clay hills I sprang,
Trickled up from the rocks
Through the silt stones and loam,
My home was the meadows.
Wheatfields my pillow,
My mother, the earth.

I chuckle. I gurgle.
I flirt with the rushes.
Through the groves rich with olives
In the velvet dark,
By the terraced gardens of dappled poplars
I kiss the foot
Of the sleeping volcano.

Under bridges,
By culverts.
Between high, handsome quaysides.

To the sea I run.
From the clay hills I came,
By the slopes
And the curves of Monticchiello,
I rise
To serenade them.
Orcia, my name.

V

No voice as achingly eloquent
As the solo cello.
Molasses and umber.
Burring.
Purring.
Velvet-toned mocha,
The weep of touched strings.
In the smoke from the wick of a blown-out candle,
The musician becomes his own music.

Animato
Con brio
Grandioso
Giojoso
Grazioso
Liberemente
Perdendosi
Doloroso.

Melody is a map
Made by silence and sound,
By the air and the body
In conjunctions of time
But even when the body that housed it is stilled,
Music subsists,
Echoes onward,
Resounds.

Dew in a garden.
The aroma of pine.
Bashful-faced lemons in terracotta pots.
Fireflies flitting.
Sun-warmed wine.
The faces of the musician’s children,

On a stage at La Foce
The world is reborn.
Mountaintops redden
In solos of dawn.
Dust on the roadways.
Miracles of rain.
Absence becomes presence
again.

Joseph O’Connor, 2024