Contemporary work

Six art songs for Bass-baryton and Piano on poems by Sir Michael Edwards (Paris Aubaine, Editions de Corlevour, 2013)

 

1/ BIRDS OF PREY

Birds of prey, maybe a dozen, soar

in windless heights of air that dwarf the Island.

Their species? The long and tapering wings,

bodies that brief and presence in Paris

deny them a name, deliver them from their names.

*

They evolve their singular fiction

in a visible nowhere above the City.

They seem to gaze fixedly on timorous creatures,

scanning the naked Cathedral square

for shrew and vole crouched in the undergrowth.

*

Up there they wheel and turn

Nonchalantly their being, who-they-are.

 

By their twin scimitars they cleave through time,

Ceaselessly moving the centres of their dance,

Scorning words and the possessing stare.

 

2/ DAY AND NIGHT

You like the lighthouse beam of the Eiffel Tower?

And its sequined gown? Me too.

Imagine, however, the Tower switched off,

and silence fallen on the city monuments,

their eyes closed by an absence of floodlight,

and all the cafés, and all the buses

unbulbed, unneonized,

and all the buildings filled with the freshness

of kindly dark, and lamp-posts

asleep and dreaming – ah! that would be

night itself, friend of the seeker

for something other than daylight, the observable,

the measurable, the arguable –

the night of the universe embracing us,

involving, comprehending us,

the great Night calling to the night within.

 

3/ THE DAY MOON

The moon by day, pale with surprise:

you are no more

(beautiful stranger from the strangeness of night,

beautiful unconcerned in the other world)

than a phantom, a soul

errant in unwonted light,

dazzled by the warm

colours of Earth.

 

4/ THE CHESTNUT TREES OF THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

Under the trees, a pause.

Whisperings
of glasses and voices.

The crowd seem
to wait, to forget.

Immobile, the statues
gaze on eternity.

The sun sheds
its grace on the gravel.

Time the invisible
disperses, deepens.

What is it that happens
when nothing happens?

Am here, and nowhere,
unknowing eye.

An emotion, mild,
intense, unfamiliar.

A presentiment among
so many strangers.

The angels ponder
the marvellous faces,

stars without number.

 

5/ SO AND SO

You watch, unwinding on the window of the taxi,
The anonymous, monotonous film of Paris.

You shun the beauty that Spring leaves announce,
Frivolity of a world that you renounce.

You despise personal elegance and vanity;
You dress for the season in clothes sober and costly.

You hunt the poor to practice your charity;
They are more at home in themselves than you are and reward you with pity.

You note with interest, several hours of the day,
Dates and donors in the Musée d’Orsay.

You walk in the catacombs, your candle ahead;
You admire the neatness in the empire of dread.

You love your neighbour as your self, the horror
Whose reflection you stare at in the mirror.

A delicious nightmare you occasionally dare:
The brushing of the impossible in the dimness of a bar.

From the top of the Eiffel Tower you see all Paris, an offered goody,
And on the ground, as the mud of the soul, your broken body.

 

6/ SNOWING

Snow, glowing geometry, lightens and softens

the air in the town’s canyons, everywhere stifles

rancour and malice, and recalls,

in immobile squares, silence.