This August 6^th is the 8^th anniversary of the Parlando Project — but it’s also the 23^rd anniversary of my late wife’s death and Hiroshima Day. This isn’t the first time I’ve linked these three observations with a single post and musical piece.

Given two-thirds of this anniversary, it’s not surprising that “I Dream I Am Falling”  is about grief and remembrance. It is a departure from the Parlando Project’s focus in that this freshly completed song uses a poem I wrote rather than our regular use of others’ words.

I continue to write poetry, though less often as I’ve aged. I think sometimes about prize-winning poet Donald Hall revealing in old age that he’d given up writing poetry. I don’t recall if he knew why he stopped writing poetry, or if he revealed the reasons for stopping if he knew them. For myself, there are elements of regular life interfering, but throughout my life the writing of poetry was the easiest art to interleave with other busyness. I would compose stanzas in my head, trusting memory retention as a good test of their value until they could be transcribed. Or like William Carlos Williams, I might jot down first drafts on prescription pads in slow worknight moments in the Emergency Department of a hospital.

Remembering that, I think writing poetry is unlike musical composition and recording, which for me is constrained by my life’s current contexts. Looking back I recall that as a younger person I was eager to write down observations from life which seemed to me to be important and unique. Now, in my older age, when I see similar things they seem less unique, and my expression of them less apt, for I sense that life I was once observing has all along been watching me too — watching me as the hunter does.

Still, the reason I set the official launch of this Project on my late wife’s death anniversary was to counter that. Life, the actuary, knows something, but I can sing in the meantime. The reason I sing others’ words in my unkempt voice is that the writers here are already dead, and I can stick my thumb in death’s eye by making their words current. Given that death’s eye socket is empty, that there’s no sensitive eyeball there, this does not stop Death — but it feels good to do it anyway.

Partway into this Project’s course I started to include Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons, in my August 6^th observances. Death of one’s specific partner has an intimacy that sears because it’s so personal, but it’s not unique nor fully shareable. The death of thousands in a way that still threatens us by the millions or more — well, shouldn’t we share that?

Let me take then a tiny digression to this presentation of today’s musical piece. This summer I’ve been watching a 10-hour multi-episode documentary on Netflix titled Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. I’m only about ¾ done with it, and maybe there’s something at the end that I should have waited to observe before writing about it, but I’ve found it so good I want to mention it today. For something of this length, its storytelling is compelling, and it often takes the sophisticated choice of leaping out of time’s lockstep to connect things. OK, it is 10 hours, but also roughly equivalent to a graduate-level course on the Cold War and atomic weapons strategy in the breadth of its concerns and detail.

This is an American Sonnet, following my longstanding practice of breaking up the 14 lines in different ways.

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Now, returning to the new song. I hope it speaks for itself. Many of you, my treasured audience, will have their own experience of grief to resonate with what it sings. I was able to compose and realize it without access to a studio space where I could use acoustic instruments and sensitive microphones. Only the vocal, through a less-sensitive microphone* recorded sounds vibrating in the air as I played the block chords appearing in the left-channel that established the song’s harmonic structure on my little plastic MIDI keyboard. You can hear “I Dream I Am Falling”  with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? This highlighted link is an alternative.

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*ElectroVoice RE-20. Worth considering for anyone needing to record vocals in a space that is not acoustically proper for recording, where low-level unwanted sounds would otherwise end up on the recording. For my budget level, expensive, but it’s been an important tool for me. No, it’s not magic — louder sounds will still intrude — but the sensitive condenser microphones I use to record with acoustic guitar in my studio-space hear everything: HVAC sounds, louder computer fans, outside traffic, even sometimes footsteps on another floor of the building. In my converted bedroom home office where this was recorded, the studio-space condensers would be highly problematic.