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it wasn't a dream... for soprano, tenor, and piano four-hands on poems of Diane Seuss

-written with gratitude for the Brooklyn Art Song Society, and with deep affection for Diane-

" 'Don't be afraid to be afraid'...didn't Marlon Brando say that somewhere? Umm humm..." -Diane Seuss, Summer 2016, Willapa Bay, WA

2 PERFORMANCE NOTES

-arrows indicate a gradual transition from one timblre or technique to another -all glissandi begin immediately and last for the duration of the note value -microtonal accidentals are executed in the standard manner -X noteheads for singers are different versions of spoken, whispered, air, half-sung/half-spoken sounds: X noteheads for pianist indicate a nonspeciﬁc pitch content (typically a cluster in a given register), but maintan the written rhythm -feathered beaming is executed in the standard manner (slow to fast/fast to slow); executing the precise rhythm is not necessary -noteheads with a slash through them are meant to be a breathy, less stable sonority, sung, but without the support typically associated with trained singers, and more akin to the singing quality of an indie, folk or pop singer -noteheads with a small curved line before or after the note value indicate a scoop into the written pitch by the singer, or a bend away from the written pitch by the singer; the direction of the scoop or bend is indicated by the shape of the curved line; the duration of this is left up to the singers -square notesheads indicate the piano string it to be tightly stopped with the ﬁnger near the pin of the string in order to create a cimbalom sonority NV = non vibrato PV = poco vibrato Ord. = in the ordinary manner

TEXTS 3 All poems used with the permission of Diane Seuss and Graywolf Press; poems taken from Four-Legged Girl, by Diane Seuss, Graywolf Press, 2015. Text in parenthesis are omitted from the score.

It wasn't a dream (part 1)

It wasn't a dream, I knew William Burroughs but not well. I was barely more than a girl, and he did not care for girls. I never got an invitation to his place, a converted urinal on the Bowery, even after he read my novel Tongue Talent, written under the pseudonym Harry Stick - I was desperate for money by then - my boyfriend was stealing me blind to feed his habit. Burroughs would have peed on my poetry, but he loved my porn, deemed it brilliant, and so I became a minor star for a few days among the members of his entourage. All I remember of that book was that it earned me $1,500 and its heroine was Kandy Kakes, who did it with snakes and horses. Victor, a co-worker at my real job where I was a secretary and he was the Xerox boy, leaned over my shoulder as I typed - Have her do it with a horse, he said. Have her do it with a snake. He moonlighted as a minor drag queen and seemed to know something about sex. What did I know? Only that it got me pregnant, and that those few weeks before I took the walk of shame into the Margaret Sanger Center, I craved tuna ﬁsh sandwiches. Still...

Free beer

Free beer I'm the one who can hold a mouthful of salt. Bring him here, the fool dressed in prison stripes. I can pray for him, even though his eyes are wild. I can de-louse the rat. When I was a kid I invited them all to a puppet show. There were no puppets; I'd planned no show. Free beer, I said, and they came. I've seen a puppet theatre. It resides in the black cavern behind my eyes. Thoughts are puppets, dangling from their tangled strings. Bring him here, the one spinning on gloom's rotisserie. I'll section an orange for the wretched bastard. I'll ladle him up a mugful of tears. Free beer, I'll say, though there is no beer.

III

It wasn't a dream (part 2)

Still, by the time she's sixteen, every girl knows how to think dirty and how to waitress or type fast enough to get a job slinging hash, or words. I served drinks for a while at a reggae club, (the Negril,) but it didn't take long for all of my Midwestern seams to show. Then I sold rubber clothes in a fetish shop, but couldn't work the cash register. I was a nanny, but quit when the kids got lice. I landed in the secretary's chair with a sigh of relief. That I could do - sitting, smoking, typing memos for condescending assholes and writing romances

4 and porn on the side, now and then a poem. The money I made paid for the rent-controlled apartment roiling with cockroaches on E. 7th St. and disappeared into my boyfriend's arm. A soup bone, now and then, wrapped in brown paper from the butcher on 2nd Ave. My boyfriend told me, years later, in our last phone conversation before he overdosed, that Burroughs taught him well, jammed that ﬁrst needle in his forearm and watchfully nearby, hunched over, wearing a face like a buzzard. It wasn't a dream...

I can't stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton

I can't stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton I bought it on E. 7th St. in a shop that was only open for one day. Kerouac used to live in that building, but he was dead by then. No zippers or buttons, just strips of fabric to tie on either side of the waist. If I had been one to twirl...but I wasn't one to twirl. Still, the skirt worked like honey to ﬂies. Many secret boyfriends, men who'd match their gait to mine and ask for my phone number. I craved tenderness, it's that simple. When the cat was let out of the bag, my real boyfriend would beat them up, bloody their noses. The real boyfriend was clean for ten years, then OD'd out of the blue. Out of the blue of that skirt, some would say. He's buried in a whaling cemetery, looking out to sea. Don't ask me why I was uninvited from the graveside service. Now I have a limp and the skirt is gone. Why do I have a limp? It involved a pair of little red shoes, a half-size too large. Soles like glass.

It wasn't a dream (part 3)

It wasn't a dream, I was there when they ﬁlmed a scene from Naked Lunch for a documentary on Burroughs, my boyfriend on camera, his best friend, Howard, the director, who would later die of AIDS, on whose lips my boyfriend would plant a last kiss. Burroughs played a doctor, covered in fake blood, with Jackie Curtis as his nurse, all done up in a Marilyn Monroe wig. I stood on the sidelines wearing a vintage muskrat coat - those were fur-wearing days. You're delicious, Jackie told me. I think she thought I was in drag too, my eyeliner curlicuing onto my temple, my long hair like a spillage of blue ink, and I was, playing girlfriend, playing secretary, sexpot, writer. Beneath it all I was a farm girl watching locusts devour the crops, wondering what all the fuss was about. At the ofﬁce they called me White Girl, another name for dumbass, innocent, a word they wouldn't have resorted to, but if they did it would have tasted bitter in their mouths. There is no redemption in having outlived them all, but having outlived Burroughs, that makes me smile a bit on the inside, though you'd never know it to look at me.

Jesus with his cup

The barber, with his mug of warm foam, his badger-hair brush. My mother and sister and me and the dog, leashed with a measure of anchor rope, in the hospital parking lot, waving good-bye to my father from his window on the 7th floor. Just him and his tumor, rare as the Hope Diamond, and his flimsy paper cup half-filled with infirmary water. The lump in my throat, a tea party cup left in the garage all winter, holding the silver body and wing dust of a dead moth.

5 The barber, sweeping the day's worth of hair into the basement, remembering how he'd traveled to Memorial to lather the face of the dying man and shave him smooth in his raised hospital bed and sometimes he shaved the faces of the dead as a favor to the mortician. Wondering how this particular life was the life that been chosen for him. The barber, walking home in the dark to a late supper of torn bread in a cup of heavy cream. Even the mayor's wife sipping from a teacup wreathed in Banded Peacock butterﬂies wonders, in her loneliness, why me? Why this cup?

Epigram

from We fear the undulant

The indigo whorls of a deiﬁc junkie alone in a shadowy room, swooning into the arms of euphoric death. There I am, bad actress wearing salt-white gloves, playing a girl who fears undulant beauty, undulant love.

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It wasn't a dream..., for soprano, tenor and piano four-hands on poems of Diane Seuss (2018)