STRIKES STORM (2022) - for tenor, horn, and piano
Premiere: Ben Boskoff DMA recital, University of Colorado Boulder, October 14th, 2022
Duration: ca. 7'
Text
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We have always worn the end of the world as a skin.
and that same world’s beginning.
Here, death takes the form of a filament
of flame, as a thread of the substance of life.
Here, water, which understands
neither demise nor origin,
leaks as from a beast’s breast—a clear dark
naive of salt’s staining, becoming now
the touch making harps
of the tender leaves’ backs,
becoming now rot’s provenance
and devourer of limestone.
Earth waits for a fate to be written, re-written.
rehashed caverns or the scattering
of seedlings or the coastlines’ illustration
or the elder trees pulled up by
unfathomable leviathan roots
this is a framework, not a violence.
the line is drawn at the question of will.
Charge splinters into noise,
Noise scatters water,
water traces the wind’s crest,
wind repatterns land, which
clasps what is given until taken back.
The prairies have no fate. The forests,
no fate. The rivers, none,
but that we make each the other’s
cause and shelter. food and flesh.
our labor is our consequence,
and our consequence, our grace:
like the organs of an animal,
not one part of us
may ever be pure of the other.
​