From A Closed Cape in Winter (Tenor and Piano)

Some pieces begin with a musical idea. This one began with a season of life — a difficult one — and the need to find some way to make sense of it. When I encountered the poetry of David Yezzi, I found a writer who could take the interior landscape of grief and loss and render it in images so precise and so physical that you could almost feel the cold coming off the page. I am deeply grateful for his generosity in allowing this text to become music.

The five movements of From a Closed Cape in Winter follow a single consciousness through the bleak geometry of a New England winter — the white house, the frozen meadows, the ice ticking against the glass — as memory, dream, and waking blur together in the way they tend to do when the mind is working something out. The imagery is Yezzi's, drawn from the coastal landscape of Naskeag Point, Maine, but the emotional terrain it maps is deeply personal to me.

The final movement reaches toward something — a bell in the fog, a channel to follow, the promise of a harbor on the other side. Whether the voice finds its way there is a question the music declines to answer definitively. Some things, it turns out, take longer than a song cycle to resolve.

From a Closed Cape in Winter

Song cycle for voice and piano

I

The white house in winter

hunches in snowy air:

the sky is white,

the trees and clearings white,

and the wind whips the sea white and black.

I see you here,

back before blankness

turned my mind to a field

over which no one

walks and where one

sees only drifts hardened in sunlight.

The white dress

you wore our first year

flounces like sea foam and falls

against the granite shore,

then recedes offshore.

Swept-out rooms no longer show

your ever being here.

II

In my dream

we are lost

in the woods.

We’ve missed

the turning

hidden by snow.

The way

we didn’t go

leads home.

The way we

are going leads

to the sea.

You follow me.

You shake.

Afraid,

you take

berries

from a bough

and put them

in your mouth.

I try to stop

you before

you swallow

more.

Snow falls

in the hourglass wood.

We have

understood

that you won’t

wake up.

It’s then I

wake up

in the white

house, ice

ticking like needles

on the glass.

 

III

Low sun, thin shadows,

sere days, frozen meadows.

Cooling coals, gray fires,

ice downing black wires.

And the lamp is burning down.

And it is miles to town.

 

IV

I hear you crying through the trees.

The white house wheezes like a patient’s

shallow breath:

at the moment of death,

his slow rattle.

I hear a sound like crying though the trees.

You return as a wind-wraith, specter-seeming,

a ghost ship

blown to tatters on its trip

home from battle.

 

V

Out in the reach

a bell is sounding the way through the fog.

Out in the reach

a gong is guiding boats past the rocks.

If I hear the channel bell

I can ride the swell to safety.

If I keep to the bell

I know the following sea will not dash me

against the bar, as it has before.

Above the still harbor I will watch for spring.

 

Naskeag Point, Maine