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.”