Enjoy three video selections from David Alpher’s Between Twilights: Seven Songs on Poems of Marsden Hartley
Robert Osborne, bass-baritone
David Alpher, composer and pianist
Recorded live at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival
Shalin Liu Performance Center
Saturday, June 24, 2017
Pipers [1:08]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNMuhwHD8I
Wingaersheek Beach [2:41]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zSUNQzADpA
Robin Hood Cove – Georgetown, Maine [5:09]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAYzo0wMbLQ
Pipers
Lapping of waters
Thick, upon razorblade
Selvages of sand,
Pipers running on them,
Wetting their shins
In the wave,
Leaving little, lost signatures
Of outmoded love,
Patched, frayed, uncalled-for
Love,
Bauble bursting love,
Dear inviolable thing --
Wingaersheek Beach
Shell
Sitting still,
Whitely, ghastly, immovable
Unless wind whip it other way
On white sand whiter in a sandway
Than itself
Holding, folding, moulding
Last curve, ancestral swirl
Bleached whiter
Lying lighter
For the whiter way, jeopardy
Of lying, by wind, sun, mist, rain, bent and torn
Sandpeep’s breast in flawless emulation
Lip in death like it
When death strike it
White
Or speechlessness of one
Gone white with ashy blight
Fear to lose a tithe of it
Thing held, from fright of it.
Robin Hood Cove – Georgetown, Maine
When evening comes to its gentle arias
Along the dusky cove,
And the blue heron flies like a slow arrow
Along the selvages of the cove,
As if to give its signal for fine music,
And the little birds who have been so warm
All day have gone in among the pine-spills
For their tithe of rest –
The white bridge joining bank to bank of the tidal river
Takes the hushed tones of evening to it ingratiatingly;
The gulls having nothing more to say
To each other – fold wings as pure hands are
Folded for a silent thought.
I stand with them all in high salute,
Saying to myself: “thanks – well done – beautiful things –
I receive my width of grace from you
And am put to rest with evening singing.”
