Kyle Gann: Your Staccato Ways
(2013)

for female voice and piano

Couplets

Flatland

Little Womb

Hotel Minor

Takeoff

Performers: Kimberly Kahan, soprano; James Fitzwilliam, piano

Your Staccato Ways is a cycle of five songs on poems of a Hudson Valley poet I once met named Karen Schoemer. She was switching to poetry as a midlife career change and I thought to give her some exposure, but I have since lost track of her. - Kyle Gann

All poems © 2013 Karen Schoemer

COUPLETS

It's quiet on this mountain ledge
as if the rock were thinking

about how they came to rest
where they rest

asking why this peak
and not another

with its view of river, fields and steeples
and not another

in the slow aftermath
or stilled anticipation of motion

do they note the haze of spring
or the peculiar brown of March grass

do they remember the hotel that stood here
bridal white in the morning light

or rue carvings
and glacial teeth

do they consider themselves
a monument to the wind

or content themselves
with the camaraderie of silence

as I do
not having you to tell this to

FLATLAND

The view draws me here
though it isn't much to look at

Ploughed fields, furrowed and dark
cob litter, stalks, a slanted fence

Orchard trees planted in rows
limbs bent to another's design

Forcing my eyes upward
toward clouds purple and skirmishing

and mountains dead ahead
their eons drifting down

Waves of repetition break
against that which will not move

I'm always here
I just don't know it

LITTLE WOMB

Berthed in this
placid pond,
I am calm.

Floating turtle-domed,
nostrils tipped,
slow and lazy,
I am benign.

The cyclorama
spins on gears
of seasons and years,
a verdant vertical

plane of trees,
shrubs, and a grassy
wading-in spot.

Blackbirds catch
an updraft
on stiffened wings.
Buckshot robins

puncture the sky.
I join the festivity
of surfaces

where this is this,
an island mind,
delicately severed
by a watery line.

HOTEL MINOR

Cars glide down
the bridge overpass,
slivered tops sliding
in and out of view.

Their silent rhythm
soothes me,
like bells in a minimalist
composition

muted and sprung
from heavenly nests,
minutely variegated,
pluvial against the drone.

I wait and watch
the cars fulcrum across
the cement anchorage
down a ramp of rust

and peeling blue,
wait for you
with your staccato ways,
here and gone

wait for the mirrored ding
of the elevator,
for your staggered footstep
in the hall,

for the rattle of handle
and suck of card in slot,
for your running hands
and mouth that leaves me

black and blue.
I wait in a room
with a door
that remains a door

and a window
that remains fixed
on this segment of bridge
as these strange

bell-less tones
calm my shaking
hands in the metallic
morning light.

TAKEOFF

On the left heads turn left
We wait for that lift
that brings optimism
and forgetting

Outside the window
trees break into a run
A boy says "Daddy
we're going fast"

A blast from a nozzle
the smell of plaid
the strain and pitch
of metal and wire

The strangeness of strangers
accelerates into me
the almost-touching
and I remember

that calculated word
you used to lift me
the plaything I imbued
with ever-absent you

What is stationery animates
what is heavy lightens
what is level upends
love is in the air

- Kyle Gann

Duration: 14 minutes total

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