• Premiere: 1 August 2019 / Atheneum, Chautauqua, NY / Chautauqua Opera / Commissioned by American Opera Projects / Timothi Williams, voice; Emily Urbanek, piano

• Instrumentation: voice and piano

• Duration: 6:30'

• Text: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

TEXT

End-of-Summer Haibun

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night.  Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light

-Aimee Nezhukumatathil

from Oceanic

(Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

Words Copyright © 2018 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Reprinted with the permission of Aimee Nezhukumatathil