Peter Halstead’s poem “Pine Wind,” performed by the poet. “Pine Wind” is the tenth film in Above Strands of Earth: Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation at Tippet Rise, a film series produced in collaboration with www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org.
Directed by Matthew Thompson and shot at Tippet Rise Art Center.
All around the wood’s dark trees
For three hundred some degrees
The world today is filled with wind
As the winter snows rescind,
Leaving bare spots where the roots
Of lodgepoles plan their fruits;
All around this budding world
The roar of altitude’s unfurled,
Descended from some troubled shear
Or disturbance in the stratosphere,
To test its strength against the tines
And tunnels of our human pines
Until beneath the glowing sky
The air is one long blowing cry,
As sun’s apocalyptic sound
Moves closer to the dripping ground,
The solar system’s hissing birth
Fallen breezily to earth,
The music of the spheres made flesh
Where planets and their subjects mesh.
March 25th, 1999
Photo by Matthew Thompson
Peter Halstead is a pianist, photographer, novelist, and poet. His six-volume piano series, Pianist Lost, can be found at pianistlost.com. Bug the Great is the first volume of his novel. He has published seven collections of poetry: Sea Sun, Blinds, Poems of Earth, Face Your Dreams, Postcard Poems, Fluorescence, and Sublimation, with Reflections forthcoming. Peter studied piano with Russell Sherman in Boston and Irma Wolpe in New York, and organ with Charles Courboin at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York.
Peter co-founded Tippet Rise Art Center and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation with his wife, Cathy. As he says, “Poetry fills in the blanks, the spaces between the lines. It’s the only way to describe things which can’t be described.”