Coda
for bass-baritone, saxophone, and piano
I. by Ezra Pound
O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
II. by Dorothy Parker
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle-
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
III. by Michael Lavers
From the garden rose the sound of bees
that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.
We ate eggs, French toast, drank milk that warmed
in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed
and looped like drunkards in the purple field.
On the porch we heard their bodies yield
to wills their fuzzy minds don’t understand.
They smelled the stains of syrup on your hand
and one, in gold-encrusted drunken strut,
smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut
along your wrist. That morning you had tied
your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,
it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.
If the next is better, I’ll still miss this world.
IV. by James Tate
Love is not worth so much;
I regret everything.
Now, on our backs,
in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
the stars are falling
into our cracked eyes.
With my good arm,
I reach for the sky
and let the air out of the moon.
It goes whizzing off
to shrivel and sink
in the ocean.
You cannot weep;
I cannot do anything
that once held an ounce
of meaning for us.
I cover you
with pine needles.
When morning comes,
I will build a cathedral
around our bodies.
And the crickets,
who sing with their knees,
will come there
in the night to be sad
when they can sing no more.
V. by Basil Bunting
A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.
Night, float us.
Offshore wind, shout,
ask the sea
what’s lost, what’s left,
what horn sunk,
what crown adrift.
Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?
VI. by Octavio Paz
Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.