Premiere: Ben Boskoff DMA recital, University of Colorado Boulder, October 14th, 2022

 

Duration:  ca. 7'

 

Text

by Marissa Davis

​

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.

​