Ode to Falmouth

Ode to Falmouth is a six-minute song setting for mezzo-soprano, piano, and ROLI Seaboard, on a poem by Maggie Zavgren. The text moves through the distortion of memory across time — a process we rarely notice but that runs through every moment of attention, as we re-interpret, gain, and lose experience without pause. The work appears on the album Imaginary Keyboards on Bandcamp.

Text

thoroughfare
that is in light then limestone
fallen, falan, Fuarè follow out to
Mashpee Commons
rowing a rowboat on Buzzard’s Bay
your heart, then over to Bassets
nests, perches, ivy unseen
get into sunrise sunlight
a full nude cast in sand
inimitable

backwards then to Hugh on screen porch
making and unmaking newspaper trident
staves in his hand, the light soft & arcane
his bodice cascading in cottontail canvas

sheets stretched overhead
or, the tandem bicycle
afternoon to
your Nashoba, you in attic under rough wool
Bleeker on the window
to morning
to the moon, as he should
as the body leans
desires and the rush
then, of filling your body with your body
in world
after lights of day into
dirts of night

we sat on rocks and old soot
to make the fire
running into Falmouth
underscore of the mile
the Whistlestop
trains we cannot even count in sleep
or, the lighthouse
northeast out to
pigshead bay or, the—swooped in music
Delius it had been
now in Appalachia the gossamer sits on women naturally

careening then in morning is only this arm
out there the pig-fox slinks into day
empty cans on the sill
these tartans clanless deliverances of color
we shining in the woodfire light
pours and fills and leans
articulation of how it were were it a body
of being of light you fall away
better in the sense of having full skins as it comes
always reserved
catching the eye in a height

what sunrise pull Mashpee to the room
lines come to hang
your stayposts be
emergent
through into morning rays
what symbols you hold
your hand stretch against itself
everything away from sun
pulling into everything
repose lineation of only to pour
unleavened in the grass
this truncated soft thought
only mask I wear as I plunder into dawn
catching sawdust as it fly
from your work

— Maggie Zavgren