lystn

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

All Night, All Night

by Delmore Schwartz

Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird

Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and

attitudes

The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,

Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced

On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.

Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish

Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights

Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still

As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,

Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar --

The bored center of this vision and condition looked and

looked

Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking

The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well

Of the great darkness under the slick glitter,

And he was only one among eight million riders and

readers.

And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum

Of the long determined passage passed through him

By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train

Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh--

The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing

The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image

Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light

Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence

Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession.

A bored child went to get a cup of water,

And crushed the cup because the water too was

Boring and merely boredom's struggle.

The child, returning, looked over the shoulder

Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder.

A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops

Drip down the fleece of many dinners.

And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew

The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified,

At regular intervals, post after post

Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees.

And then the bird cried as if to all of us:

0 your life, your lonely life

What have you ever done with it,

And done with the great gift of consciousness?

What will you ever do with your life before death's

knife

Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?

As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,

Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast

Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,

An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:

This is the way that night passes by, this

Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable

abyss.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman