LEAVES for Piano and Orchestra
LEAVES was commissioned for the 50th Anniversary of Palomar College. It was premiered in 1996 with Peter Gach, Piano, David Connor, Narrator, and the Palomar College Orchestra, Bob Gilson, Conductor. [See below for the complete poem used in the composition.]
With the Leaves of Yellow Birch
For George
With the leaves of yellow birch,
mix my ashes
and scatter me across
the bluest water
north.
From above,
in a dark canoe,
you will see
me drift
into the deep
like the ancient dust
of a star exploded
and sifting back
into the universe.
Scatter me on Stillwater
where, to tell the truth,
the New England coyote
woke me:
“My dung feeds the black spruce
and the cardinal flower.
In death, my carcass will host maggots
and sweeten the lavender pickerel weed
and make the crow’s eye shine all the blacker.”
“Listen: how the night throbs!
The herons go hungry,
the blighted hemlock falls,
and the beaver sickens and drowns in the mire.
You who moved to the cities
and forgot this place,
will soon be taken in,
and pulled down to the bottom,
sweet and soft,
like rotting cedar.”
This is why my veins stung
when I saw the virgin pines.
This is why I moved
at the sob of a white-throated sparrow.
I returned,
year upon year,
to catch our faces
remembering who we were
as we peered over the gunnel
into the lake’s wide mirror.
My, love,
I must tell you,
if you alone,
what I heard one night
camped on a sandy island:
“You will feel my touch as the balsam brushes across your lovely face.
You will taste my breath
as the late morning wind
stacks the water like hills of diamonds.
Even frail and blurred by age
you will see,
if you return,
treasure
sparkling
beneath
the lake’s wide mirror.”
-David Henry Roberts III