the dreaming tree

i just wrote a piece for choir that, i hope, will rock people’s faces off at the composers’ symposium. yes…prepare to be moved. except that none of you will be there. that’s ok…i’ll be moved for you. the text is simply:

kyrie eleison
christe eleison
kyrie eleison

and i’m also working on a song with an e.e. cummings text:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands.