Dark Praise, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer & Steve Law

Dark Praise

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer & Steve Law

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1.	Rosemery Wahtola Trommer & Steve Law - Teach Me the Dark 02:10	lyrics	buy track
Teach me the dark, the infinite shades of the infinite dark, the basis of all the light that is, the origin, the ink bright spark that leaps from the great black well, the darkling spring, the raven luck, the mother from which the big bang sprang, the womb of dawn, the only cloak measureless enough to hold everything, everything in its folds. Teach me the inner midnight, the moonless rooms, the lavish corners, the mighty dark inside the fist, the vastness of limitless space that links with no effort the everything that is, the everything that ever was, the everything that will ever be. Teach me the song of soil, the song of deep winter, the pure dark song of the sea. All the dark that’s been terrorized by light, and all the dark that’s been pushed away and all the dark that’s been feared, teach me its valor, its ferocity, its kindness, its gentleness, its blinding generosity.
2.	After We'd Been in the Cave Over an Hour 02:00	lyrics	buy track
Long after our eyes adjusted to the small, round beams of light that shined on thick white columns and reflected the rings of drips into shallow pools, after we’d become accustomed to the resonant dim, at last we found a place to sit and turned off our lights and listened to the dark. The only sound, the astonished heart, persistent breath, and the drip, drip, drip of stalactites doing their patient work. How I longed to bring us all into the cave where we are forced to forget any differences the light might suggest. How I loved the way my senses stretched out to feel the other beating hearts. Imagine we could do this every night— could feel the other hearts in the dark, all of them beating like our own. Imagine no storms could touch us. Imagine we forgot it could ever be any other way— your heart, my heart, beating wild, listening for each other.
3.	Mycelial 02:01	lyrics	buy track
Now I understand how grief is like a mushroom— how it thrives in dark conditions. How it springs directly from what is dead. Such a curious blossoming thing, how it rises and unfurls in spontaneous bourgeoning, a kingdom all its own. Like a mushroom, most of grief is never seen. It grows and expands beneath everything. Sometimes it stays dormant for years. Grief, like a mushroom, can be almost unbearably beautiful, even exotic, delicate, veiled, can arrive in any shape and hue. It pulls me closer in. Like a mushroom, grief asks me to travel to regions of shadow and dim. I’m astonished by what I find— mystery, abundance, insight. Like a mushroom, grief can be wildly generative. Not all growth takes place in the light.
4.	Talking with My Daughter About Grief 01:24	lyrics	buy track
We lie in the dark and speak about anything but what I ache to speak about. Some part of me longs to find the words like search lights that will help us find what we don’t yet know we are looking for. Or a black light that might help us see what is valuable right here, but invisible to our ordinary eyes. I try to infuse my words with candlelight, but somehow even this feels too brash, too aggressive, and so we lie in the dark and I let the moon do all the talking, oh waning crescent, you know when to shine, when to simply be held by the dark.
5.	Lumbricus Terrestris 01:43	lyrics	buy track
On a day when the world is weighty, dark and dense with need, I want to be the earthworm that gives itself over to tunneling, its every movement an act of bringing spaciousness. And when minutes feel crushed by urgency, I want to meet the world wormlike, which is to say grounded, consistent, even slow. No matter how desperate the situation, the worm does not tunnel faster nor burrow more. It knows it can take decades to build fine soil. To whatever is compacted, the worm offers its good worm work, quietly bringing porosity to what is trodden, compressed. So often, in my rush to repair, I end up exhausted. Let my gift to the world be my constancy, a devotion to openness, my willingness to be with what is. Let my gift to myself be patience as I tend what is dense and dark.
6.	The One Who Thrives 01:27	lyrics	buy track
She has learned to bloom like the tuberose, opening in the light but becoming more potent in the dark. Sweet scent of honey. Tenacious scent of jasmine. The hard won scent of hope. Scent of the one who has learned to thrive when thriving doesn’t feel possible. Scent of resilience. Scent of I can. Scent of the one who finds grace on the inside. Scent of elusive beauty. Scent of the one who meets the soils made of sorrow, who brings to the world a gift as astonishing as a night-blooming flower, a gift as honest as the moon.
7.	Because Last Night I Dreamt of You 01:52	lyrics	buy track
This morning I wake and my body is a concert hall still echoing the beauty of the night before— like the morning after the symphony when the theater walls and the red velvet curtains still remember the swell, the strings, the silence before the applause. Oh, how I love my body on these mornings. I linger in the sheets, my eyes closed, my arms flung over my head, my belly soft as I open myself to memory. It’s fleeting, it’s flirty, it’s there, then it’s not. What was symphonic is now a mere echo of what was— as if everyone left, but the drummer is still there alone on stage, beating out a tempo, complex, but true. Hello heart. Hello heart. Was it really just a dream? The melody escapes me, but I swear I still hear the rhythm.
8.	With Red Thread 01:55	lyrics	buy track
It was Sam who, that summer before fourth grade, danced with me at the church camp dance and asked me to walk outside with him. “It’s hot,” he said. “Let’s go look at the stars.” And I, who did not yet understand the sweet cramping that tendrilled deep in my gut when Sam held my hand, said yes. We stood there a long time, me looking out at the stars because that is what we were there to do. The night was the color of Wisconsin violets, crushed, and Sam, still holding my hand murmured low, “Oh, look over there,” and, when I turned my feathered head, he leaned in quick and close and kissed my astonished lips. Even thirty-five years later, I am still somewhat unprepared as I write what happened next, how he sprinted away, a gleesome hart, how I stood there, still, my lips apart, the soft hands of the night still holding the most tender parts of me as they spilled like fruit no one knew was yet ripe, and the sharp stitch of longing so new to me sewed itself into my breath and never left.
9.	Wild Rose Goes for a Drive with God 01:35	lyrics	buy track
But first, she takes a few slugs of absinthe. The pale green thrill of it blazes in her throat. God walks in just as she finishes her glass. God finishes the bottle. Then he says, Are you nervous? Wild Rose doesn’t hesitate to say, No way. I am ready for anything. God says they’re going for a spin. Wild Rose doesn’t care where. All she wants is for God to show her a real good time. And she is open to what that means. Here, says God, as they arrive at the car, climb in. He opens the driver’s seat door for her. She pours her long legs in. There’s no brake, she sees. No rear view mirror. No reverse. No safety belts. A big back seat. Oh yeah, she says, and revs the engine. The night smells like licorice, like sweat.
10.	I Want to Listen to Your Absence 02:13	lyrics	buy track
I want to listen to your absence the way I listen to the night— the way the dark somehow invites a deeper listening. I want to hear, for instance, the way silence fills in where your voice has been, or the way the room seems to know itself by the pound of missing footsteps, and in this way, I find you where I cannot find you. I am thinking of how the night opens up between the calls of the owl and how I listen in that interval not only with my ears, but with my skin. I want to listen for you with my lungs— as if every breath is attentive to the syllables of grief, of love. I want my heart to angle in to hear what the silence has to say. I don’t want to hear what I most want to hear— I want to hear what is really here. I want to listen and learn from the listening. I want to hear what is true. I want to listen into your absence and lean into it the way I lean into the night— something so much larger than me, something familiar and always new, something so present, yet unable to be touched. Something I am still learning to love.
11.	In Those Quiet Hours 02:46	lyrics	buy track
For two weeks after he died, I’d fall asleep exhausted only to wake just past midnight. Desperate, I’d claw at sleep, frantic to catch it and clutch it, but always it slipped my grasp and I’d lie awake till morning. My friend suggested I reframe those sleepless hours as a sacred time, an intimate, personal quiet time. Not a problem. Not something to be treated. Not something to be feared. That night, as I emerged from sleep, dreams dripping from me like water, I did not resist the waking. Instead, eyes closed, heart open, still lying in bed, I said, I love you, Finn. I miss you, sweetheart. And woke on the shore of morning. Ever since, it happens just like this— when I slip from sleep, I tell my son I love him and slide unknowingly back into the tide of dreams. How many hundreds of times when he was young, did I go to him when he cried out in the night? I’d press my palms against his chest until his breath was a skiff for dreams. Years later, though I can’t feel his hands, though I don’t hear the lullaby of his breath, somehow he arrives to comfort me. And though I don’t hear him say the words I’d always say to him, I feel them float above me like a blanket, warm in the cool night air— Shhh. I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here.
12.	Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer - The Invitation 02:07	lyrics	buy track
Two nights after he died, all night I heard the same one-line story on repeat: I am the woman whose son took his life. The words felt full of self-pity, filled me with hopelessness, doom. And then a voice came, a woman’s voice, just before dawn, and it gave me a new shade of truth: I am the woman who learns how to love him now that he’s gone. It did not change the facts, but it changed everything about how I met the facts. Over a hundred days later, I am still learning what it means to love him—how love is an ocean, a wildfire, a crumb; how commitment to love changes me, changes everyone, invites us to bring our best. Love is wine, is trampoline, is an infinite song with a chorus in which I am sung. I am the woman who learns how to love him now that he’s gone. May I always be learning how to love— like a cave. Like a rough-legged hawk. Like a sun.
13.	To Everyone Who Has Offered Me Support This Year 01:18	lyrics	buy track
Let’s say we gathered on the street tomorrow, and let’s say we met in Kazakhstan on a windy day near the Caspian Shore, then I would say to you, as the Kazakhs do, I see the sun on your back. It means, Thank you for being you. It means, I am alive because of your help. Then I would ask to hug you and probably cry because it’s everything, what you’ve done for me. And as you walk away, I would marvel at the radiance beaming from between your shoulders, shining down your spine. It’s been so dark, and oh, how you’ve carried me with your light.
14.	To Face the Dark 01:40	lyrics	buy track
To face the dark, one does not need a light. Nor does one need a watch, a feather, a melody, a sword, a pen. One doesn’t even need a friend. To face the dark, one needs only to face the dark. There is something easier then about the facing, when we know we need no preparation. Nothing is asked of us except the willingness to face the dark, the willingness to pause in that moment when we cannot see, cannot know, cannot float on the sea of habit, cannot fly on the feathers of routine. But already, I’ve taken this too far. It’s so simple, the invitation, that it’s easy to miss what is asked. Not a journey. Not even a step. Just the chance to face the dark, to meet yourself in that facing— and to notice what being erased and what’s doing the erasing.

about

"Teach me the dark," begins the first poem on this spoken word album, a collaboration between poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and guitar player Steve Law. The album explores "endarkenment"--all the ways the dark invites us to revelation, sensuality, play, intimacy, dreams, meditation, receptivity, self-exploration and self-discovery. As Rainier Maria Rilke wrote, "You, darkness that I come from, I love you."

credits

released July 14, 2023

cover image created by Marisa S. White, design by Tony Jeannette

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about

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Telluride, Colorado

I've been writing and sharing daily poems since 2006--and performing with music is one of my favorite thrills. Guitarist Steve Law created these fabulous soundscapes for this album that explores the dark. To hear more poems, check out The Poetic Path--a daily poem shared on the Ritual app. To read more poems, pick up one of my 13 books or visit my daily blog. Maybe come write with me sometime? ... more