AUTUMN SONGS
For mezzo-soprano and instrumental sextet

Ascension: Autumn Dusk in Central Park

Featureless people glide with dim motion through a quivering blue silver;
Boats merge with the bronze-gold welters about their keels.
The trees float upward in gray and green flames.
Clouds, swans, boats, trees, all gliding up a hillside
After some gray old women who lift their gaunt forms
From falling shrouds of leaves.

Thin fingers twigs clutch darkly at nothing.
Crackling skeletons shine.
Along the smutted horizons of Fifth Avenue
The hooded houses watch heavily
With oily gold eyes.

– Evelyn Scott (1893-1963). Public domain. From Precipitations, 1920, Mahattan, The Unpeopled City.

Under the Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

– Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Public domain.

All Hallows’ Eve

Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

– Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), from Coming to That: Graywolf Press, © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning. Reprinted with permission from Graywolf Press c/o The Permissions Company LLC.

November for Beginners

Snow would be the easy
way out — that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won’t give.

So we wait, breeding
mood, making music
of decline. We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind,
with your cargo of zithers!

November 1981

– Rita Dove (b. 1952). November for Beginners, from Collected Poems 1974-2004 by Rota Dove, W.W. Norton & Co., New York 2016. Used by permission of Rita Dove.

Leaves Before the Wind

We have walked, looked at the actual trees:
The chestnut leaves wide-open like a hand,
The beech leaves bronzing under every breeze,
We have felt flowing through our knees
As if we were the wind.

We have sat silent when two horses came,
Jangling their harness, to mow the long grass.
We have sat long and never found a name
For this suspension in the heart of flame
That does not pass.

We have said nothing; we have parted often,
Not looking back, as if departure took
An absolute will — once not again
(But this is each day’s feat, as when
The heart first shook).

Where fervor opens every instant so,
There is no instant that is not a curve,
And we are always coming as we go;
We lean toward the meeting that will show
Love’s very nerve.

And so exposed (O leaves before the wind!)
We bear this flowing fire, forever free,
And learn through devious paths to find
The whole, the center, and perhaps unbind
The mystery

Where there are no roots, only fervent leaves,
Nourished on meditations and the air,
Where all that comes is also all that leaves,
And every hope compassionately lives
Close to despair.

– May Sarton (1912-1995). Leaves before the Wind by May Sarton, from Collected poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Reprinted with permission from Russell & Volkening.