Get all 14 Gabriel Kahane releases available on Bandcamp and save 30%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of MAGNIFICENT BIRD, To Be American (oxblood glow edition), emergency shelter intake form, Book of Travelers, Little Love (ruined lace edition), Works on Paper: Music for Solo Piano, Crane Palimpsest EP, The Fiction Issue, and 6 more.
1. |
We Are the Saints
03:15
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These days of wandering,
Blood blindfold armory,
I want to hold you close,
Oh, comfort me.
We’ll glide down these crowded streets
And see the kids who plead
For something to love.
If this is all there is—
Hashtags and genesis
And heads of state all made from
Papier mâché—
We’re washing the eyelids
Of our kin,
It’s mourning in America.
I keep dreaming that I’m climbing up a dusty road
To the top of a cold clear mountain,
Guided by a voice on the radio, it says,
Your feet are the future, so keep on walking
Toward the little piles of broken stones.
When silent spring began,
It seemed God had a plan
To strip the scales from the eyes of the shiftless
The shirt-sleeved, the sun-dressed,
The new baptized witnesses.
But watch how the emperor
Feeds his prey to keep the truth at bay,
And now we’re fighting over scraps again.
We are the Saints;
We are the Saints.
But in that dream I see a circle of light and hope,
And strangers looking deep in the eyes
Of someone they thought they didn’t know, they say,
Your feet are the future, so keep on walking
Toward the little piles of broken stones.
These days of wandering,
Blood blindfold armory,
I want to hold you close,
Oh, comfort me.
We’ll glide down
These empty streets
And see the blue and green After the flood.
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2. |
Hot Pink Raingear
02:22
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I am sitting on a miniature
Cherry-colored plastic chair
On the porch of our new home
In Portland, Oregon,
Which is not on fire.
In fact, last night
Rain began to fall:
It was the first substantial rain
Of winter and we were all relieved
After the inferno
That had burned through bush and brier.
And we sang la da da…
Well, the color,
The color of the sky—
I’d call it Crayola Violet, while
The complex chord of a train
Dopplers in the distance
For everyone to hear.
And across,
Across the street,
A man in hot pink raingear
Sleepwalks his dog in the
Lavish morning quiet
With plastic stuffed in his ear.
And we sang la da da…
Well, the trucks
Judder down the city block
Young men bobble boxes
Full of almond milk and cell phone chargers
Packed up in the skin of dying trees
Baby, if that ain’t progress,
Then what’s it gonna be?
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3. |
The Hazelnut Tree
02:20
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The papers spell fresh threats of doom.
Squinting to read in the dark of the bedroom
I hear the breath of my child,
Ain’t love the thing that’s beguiled us
For ages, and still…
The pages of newsprint can fill
Me with what do you call that feeling—
Like spiders are crawling into your head?
Wake up tangled in the bed,
A dream, an explosion, the dead,
Survivors in black and blue and red.
Last night we three went outside,
Looked at the harvest moon, hollow
And high in the sky where the satellites beam
The faces of men to our neighbor’s TV screen—
It’s more information than I need.
Fold up the paper I’m done,
Glide through the front hall,
Open the door, see the sun
On the hazelnut tree:
That’s something I still believe.
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4. |
To Be American
02:57
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To be American again,
Teenaged and certain of innocence:
Six lanes of Western caravan
Burn fuel to speed up the renaissance.
Before the trench coats and the roped off rooms,
The shell-shocked mothers and the TV crews,
Foreclosing a grand old dream—
Black motorcade running on empty,
Big box and a Ponzi scheme,
Drain everything, land of the plenty.
In high school I sang in the choir
With all the Mormons from Rohnert Park.
Now all their houses are on fire;
Strange glow of oxblood in the dark.
I think we all meant well, or so I thought,
That season, privilege was a parking spot.
Foreclosing a grand old dream—
Black motorcade running on empty,
Big box and a Ponzi scheme,
Drain everything, land of the plenty.
If Reconstruction and the War
Seemed distant back in eleventh grade,
How quaint our simple lives before
Seem now in face of the coming days.
Foreclosing a grand old dream—
Black motorcade running on empty,
Big box and a Ponzi scheme,
Drain everything, land of the plenty.
Our furniture’s on the street;
In every church last rites are spoken.
One criminal’s soft defeat
Can’t change the fact that we’re broken.
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5. |
Chemex
02:23
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O bleary predawn gothic: blue, black, and grey.
Stumble sleepwalk to the kitchen.
Only this single ritual could start the day,
Head bowed at the altar of this brackish liquid.
Gather materials: filter, kettle, urn;
Boil the water, begin to pour;
Go fetch the paper from the front step and learn
That the country fears another Civil War.
Light starts to leak through the antique window
Your wife and daughter are still asleep in bed
At the bottom of your mug is a map of Ohio
At the bottom of your heart is a map of your dread.
Under a weird blue smokeless sky you drink up—
Soon will be time for another cup.
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6. |
Linda & Stuart
02:38
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Linda and Stuart, trapped in their apartment
Seventy-ninth and Madison, the one they bought
Fifty years ago. No fancy lobby, no baroque Fresco.
The deliverymen, in their light blue surgical masks,
Knock twice, leave groceries double-bagged at the door,
Then cross the street back to the shop and the basement below.
Last week I called and asked, “How’s your relative stock of despair, today?”
Linda replied, saying, “Gabriel, I know I really shouldn’t complain,
But each month this persists is one that we’re not getting back,
For we’ve little time left on this spinning marble.”
Her point of view I can’t dismiss—and what is there to say, in fact?—
So I’m left with hollow platitudes to mumble.
Straining to hear a few bars of the Upper East Side,
I find I’ve not allowed myself, haven’t really had the time
To miss New York, the freak show light.
That universe of regret that I keep locked in a wooden box,
With all the other thoughts and self-pity,
Maybe sometime yet I’ll hop a plane and catch a taxi
Downtown, just to hear the sound of the old city
Sirens and the subway and the slurred words of the shirt-sleeved men
On the town to toast the close of a deal
That shuttered the last factory in every town
In Michigan, where the union boys are stone-faced at the wheel.
Linda tells me she’s taking a writing class
On the art of the short story, and I say, hey that’s great, ’cause
We all need a way to make sense of the world.
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7. |
Magnificent Bird
02:41
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In a glossy monthly magazine
With lush ads hawking luxury
I read about a young woman;
It got me down.
It described her songs as sorcery,
Troubled childhood transformed to be
Magnificent rare birds,
Rare birds of sound.
I felt the pangs of pettiness and jealousy swell in my chest.
How easy to forget you’re already blessed.
Envy makes me feel ashamed
I suppose that’s why I stepped away
For a year clear of the scroll
A picc line drip of glowing hearts
Righteousness and shopping carts
As if it could ever make us whole
And when my friends call and tell me that
It’s worse than before, friendly fire
And hungry for more,
I don’t know what to say.
Set those feelings in a drawer,
Swallowed the key and locked the door
and walked right out of the room
I put that rare bird’s record on,
Tried my best to sing along
The words were unfamiliar,
But I could carry the tune.
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8. |
The Basement Engineer
01:47
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The basement engineer inventor:
If there’s free speech he believes truth will prevail,
Blind to the movements of the emperor,
In his palace made of glass he thumbs the scale.
Watch his dead eyes open
As the rats come to feed.
Angry words are spoken.
Someday someone’s gonna bleed.
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9. |
Die Traumdeutung
03:53
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This time, I’m listening on the radio—
The explosion, even on speakers,
Rattles my ribcage. There are screams,
Chaotic shouts, voices I think I know,
Or maybe I don’t, and then silence.
This is the new Age of Anxiety.
If I am a camera, I see three starfish in the bed.
All of us dreaming, one of us too young
Too have learned to dream in red.
Jump cut to a wide shot of the sky:
Three hundred million fists clenched tight.
All these months I’ve slept
With a pencil tied onto my finger
Thinking that it might help me sleep.
But instead I find I’m left
With these photographs that only linger
After I write down what I’ve seen.
After the silence, a change of scene. I’m
In some kind of safe house, having my
Head shaved, being trained as an assassin.
I think these images must spring
From the vault of action movies
I have stockpiled on sleepless nights, on
Transatlantic flights over the ocean…
For tours, a relic of an earlier age:
When we sat in airport lounges drinking Scotch,
Eating pretzels, watching cable news,
Oblivious to the mess that I was making for you.
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10. |
Sit Shiva
03:21
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My mother, describing her mother,
Fought back tears, it’s weird, I thought,
The intimacy of seeing someone try
Not to cry in close-up on a screen.
Cousin Lincoln told a story about the Pietà
He saw at the Metropolitan Museum;
and after a silence of some time,
Grandma turned to him and said:
“You know, I think of myself as a Jew,
but I really love Jesus.”
And we sit cross-legged on the edge of the bed,
Leaning into the laptop to hear what’s just been said,
In the manner of a modern family honoring the dead.
Aunt Susan, in her one-room schoolhouse
Sang grandma’s favorite songs, simple hymns
Of love and loss. And though her connection
Was unstable, she was able to get
Her message, more or less, across.
And we sit cross-legged on the edge of the bed,
Leaning into the laptop to hear what’s just been said,
In the manner of a modern family honoring the dead.
At the end of the afternoon,
Grandma’s grief-shattered husband,
Whom she’d met in the fall of 1939,
Milkshake at the Automat in Morningside Heights.
Before he was shipped off to Europe to fight—
Fifty years, not a word, not a sight
’Til the touchtone phone rang in 1995:
“Raymond, it’s Judith; my husband has died.”
Back to New York, and they gave it a try
And the photographs of great-grandchildren multiplied,
These two ancient lovers walking side by side—
His body ravaged, and hers turned to light—
He raised his hand to speak at last,
And everyone held their breath or gasped,
As he said, “Goodbye, my darling, goodbye.”
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Gabriel Kahane Portland, Oregon
Gabriel Kahane is eating chocolate bread.
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