August 5, 2022

International Congress of Voice Teachers

Joseph Haydnsaal

16:00 (4:00 p.m.)

Epilogue - Jessica Rudman

Now stands my task accomplished.Let when it will that day that has no claim but to my mortal body end the span of my uncertain years. Yet! Yet, I’ll be borne the finer parts of me above the stars immortal and my name shall never die. If truth at all is stablished by poetic prophesy…

Living in the Body - Lori Laitman

1. Burning the Woods of My Childhood

I am burning the woods of my childhood, tree by tree,

I am warming myself by the fire of those days

I am remembering faces I can no longer see.

And the places I loved that are gone from me

and the roads and the paths and the open ways,

I am burning the woods of my childhood, tree by tree.

Where the elm trees stood, where the fox ran free,

and we listened to the owl and the screeching jays,

I am remembering the faces I can no longer see.

For those who walked under the pines with me,

who cannot join me at the fire as I sit and gaze,

I am burning the woods of my childhood, tree by tree

Thinking old dreams that no longer can be

Watching them fall into ashes the reds into grays

I am remembering the faces I no longer can see.

While the fire goes low and night is around me,

the memory of that time rises up from the haze.

I am burning the woods of my childhood, tree by tree,

I am remembering the faces I no longer can see.

2. Living in the Body

Body is something you need in order to stay

on this planet and you only get one.

And no matter which one you get, it will not

be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful

enough, it will not be fast enough, it will

not keep on for days at a time, but will

pull you down into a sleepy swamp and

demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry

from one day into the next. Always the

same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same

skin when you look in the mirror, and the

same creaky knee when you get up from the

floor and the same wrist under the watchband.

The changes you can make are small and

costly—better to leave it as it is.

Body is a thing that you have to leave

eventually. You know that because you have

seen others do it, others who were once like you,

living inside their pile of bones and

flesh, smiling at you, loving you,

leaning in the doorway, talking to you

for hours and then one day they

are gone. No forwarding address.

3. Not for Burning

I come across your old letters,

the words still clinging to the page,

holding on to their places patiently,

with no intention of abandoning 

the white spaces. They say

that you will always love me,

and reading them again, I almost

believe it, but I suspect that 

they are heretics, that later, 

in the fire, they will deny it all.

Then I remember something I once

read (my memory is filled with voices

of the dead): that it is a heretic which 

makes the fire, and that I am more guilty

than your words, poor pilgrims who trusted

the road you sent them down and kept

severely to the way. I forgive them;

I let them live to proclaim freely what

they thought would always be true.

4. Lost at Table

The weave in the green tablecloth

is open. Enter, it says, and I do,

sinking down into warp and woof,

snug in a tiny linen homestead, somewhere

east of candlestick and west of tapestry napkin.

And if my disappearance is noticed,

they have ways to bring me back again:

conversation will hover, like heat-detecting 

helicopters over endless acres of cornfields

and find me sleeping between the rows

or walking aimlessly, singing my song

to turn a thousand ears from green to gold.

5. Bring on the Rain

Bring on the rain and bang the leafy

drum with sudden sticks of water.

Pull down the silver-chained curtain

and fill the window with streams

of widest water falling through

the shoreless air.

Let the rainy sky be filled with jazz:

drizzling saxophones, rivers of 

trumpet, xylophone pools.

Send down some Billie Holiday

to write sorrow on our

dusty hearts.

And long may the rain fall, whispering

like a green tongue, just a summer’s night

slipping like a silk dress over the

lovely bones of earth,

misty in the fields.

6. Crossroads

The second half of my life will be black 

to the white rind of the old and fading moon.

The second half of my life will be water

over the cracked floor of these desert years.

I will land on my feet this time,

knowing at least two languages and who my friends are. I will dress for the

occasion, and my hair shall be 

whatever color I please.

Everyone will go on celebrating the old 

birthday, counting the years as usual,

but I will count myself new from this 

inception, this imprint of my own desire.

The second half of my life will be swift,

past leaning fenceposts, a gravel shoulder,

asphalt tickets, the beckon of open road.

The second half of my life will be wide-eyed,

fingers sifting through find sands,

arms loose at my sides, wandering feet.

There will be new dreams every night,

and the drapes will never be closed.

I will toss my sting of keys into a deep

well and old letters into the grate.

(the following stanza is part of the poem but not part of the song)

The second half of my life will be ice

breaking up on the river, rain

soaking fields, a hand

help out, a fire

and smoke going

upward, always up.

Vanishing Act - Jamie Leigh Sampson

Increase autumn summer’s time bareness what freezings the absence hath…

What would happen to her plants if suddenly she disappeared? 

Neither ex nor in. Just gone. 

They could not exist as they had before. 

Instead they tumble, they struggle

To maintain a half-life of a relationship

Herself freezings dark December’s everywhere

removed summer’s time autumn rich

increase bearing burthen her neighbors

Scan for comets closing in

For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan

I wanted partial for herself 

neighbors tries to weather and attempts pleasures

thou sing dull look winter’s time

How like from freezings what old bareness time summer’s autumn increase wanton prime after decease issue me

For she will kill you with the loving of you

A lesson in perspective that a lifetime is only a vanishing act.

The Meteorologist Receives More Letters Asking - Ruby Fulton

Please name the hurricane after my cousin Faith… who is a force of blow-dried hair and sorrow long as fake lashes. For Gwen, who crashed even parties she’s invited to; folds sky instead of paper airplanes. Judas. (Too few people get named that.) Me: so we’re all to blame for the damage. Hurricane 9-11; Civilian Collateral Damage, Hurricane Fill-in-the-Blank War. Ginger Rogers or Louis Armstrong- like posthumous Oscars. All cosmic and spit-shined. Ken Burns for that fucking slide show. Let’s pretend we’ll linger on every body. Call this one Baba Yaga. Hurricane Witch Baby. The-Earth-Gnashing-It’s-Iron-Teeth-to-Eat-You. Hurricane Pre-school Teacher gluing styrofoam fangs onto socks, like the world was the safe kind of floppy, we were all its creators. Hurricane World Bank, Housing Crash, Hipster-hibiscus-donut-and-tea-shops-named-Bloom-and-Spoon-are-eclipsing-my-neighborhood. (Don’t name it Spoon, please). Godiva. I’ve always liked that. Naked as a high-pressure system. Give it a Christian name. A name that seems personal. George Carlin says, No one cares about people killed by a number. Hurricane Voter Fraud. Don’t name it Sandy Hook, Columbine- places not the people who died there. Wait til after. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Fill in the lives between hyphens. Hurricane Hurricane at #Hurricane. Please call it Batman. Black Lives. Grace. (I’m Catholic & when God makes me kneel at a child’s funeral, it still feels like whiplash.) Hurricane Scary-grin Emoticon. Loneliness-is-kudzu-with-a-head-start-on-everything. Have you ever been in one, Mr. Weather? It feels nothing like Floyd. Hurricane My sister dropping dirt on my nephews coffin with the same leather gloves she wears to feed the donkey he named as a boy. Hurricane Suicide twisting his mind into Molotov cocktails-crumpling drafts of every love, thought, don’t-pull-the-trigger. Hurricane Gabriel: annunciation trumpet blown by Chihuly- spiral dead-ends and glass-notes. Hurricane Chora for the empty space Plato says form passes through into form. Like the eye of a storm, a woman’s body. My sister holding carrots out for Neige to crunch and nuzzle. Hurricane Because there is no choice but to imagine the unbearable to bear it.