PROGRAM NOTE
The five songs in this work, while not forming a narrative or a cycle, do share, in a roundabout way, a common thrust. What links them is the sense of a life lived, of experience gained, and of the unstoppable succession of events which make living reckless. The two shortest songs (1 and 3) address the nature of the soul. The remaining poems look at life in the body—the sad, restless peripatetic life of Dora Williams, the archetypal vision of the child eventually superseding the father in My Roaring Boy, or the passing of time and the ghostly remembrance of bright lives vanished away in Beyond the Hunting Woods.

TEXTS
If the Soul Was Born with Pinions
If the soul was born with pinions
What are hovels to it, what are mansions? 
What's Genghis Khan to it and what his Hordes?
I have two enemies in all the world,
Two twins, inseparably fused:
The hunger of the hungry and the fullness of the full. 
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) trans. David McDuff


Dora Williams 
When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me
I went to Springfield. There I met a lush,
Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.
He married me when drunk. My life was wretched.
A year passed and one day they found him dead.
That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago.
After a time I met Tyler Rountree, villain.
I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate
Went mad about me–so another fortune.
He died one night right in my arms, you know.
(I saw his purple face for years thereafter.)
There was almost a scandal. I moved on,
This time to Paris. I was now a woman,
insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich.
My sweet apartment near the Champs Élysées
Became a center for all sorts of people,
musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles, 
Where we spoke French and German, Italian, English.
I wed Count Navigato, native of Genoa.
We went to Rome. He poisoned me, I think.
Now in the Campo Santo overlooking
The sea where young Columbus dreamed new worlds,
See what they chiseled: “Contessa Navigato
Implora eterna quiete.” 
Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) 


On Foot I had to Walk through the Solar Systems
On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts. 
Edith Södergran (1892–1923) trans. Stina Katchadourian 


My Roaring Boy
My roaring boy comes home,
I hear him lungful across
the shifting corn, he scatters
the stooks and all before him, he is
bright as a cob's flank in June,
true as a ploughshare´s chop
through the dark, dark earth,
larger than the harvest moon
which is an owl's eye and cannot
lie and cannot deny his undoing
as the years fold and fold upon
themselves and his seed grows 
to his overthrow and I do love him,
and he is forever bright, forever
true, forever larger than the moon.
My boy comes roaring home. 
Deborah Randall (b.1957) 


Beyond the Hunting Woods
I speak of that great house
Beyond the hunting woods,
Turreted and towered
In nineteenth-century style,
Where fireflies by the hundreds
Leap in the long grass,
Odor of jessamine
And roses, canker-bit,
Recalling famous times 
When dame and maiden sipped
Sassafras or wild
Elderberry wine, 
While far in the hunting woods
Men after their red hounds
Pursued the mythic beast. 

I ask it of a stranger,
In all that great house finding
Not any living thing,
Or of the wind and the weather,
What charm was in that wine
That they should vanish so,
Ladies in their stiff
Bone and clean of limb,
And over the hunting woods
What mist had made them wild
That gentlemen should lose
Not only the beast in view
But Belle and Ginger too,
Nor home from the hunting woods
Ever, ever come? 
Donald Justice (b.1925)