Heavy, Like Water (2018)
Performers:
C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
Conducted by Daniel Andor-Ardó
Audio recording by Brian Mountford
Text:
Excerpts from poetry by Brandon Jordan Brown. Used by permission.
I. When It Rains
I woke to see the pond had been working all night,
its belly loaded with so much rain it swelled
halfway up the yard. Rain for three days straight.
No pollen. No cold. Just premonitions of rusty blades.
The fish stay hidden in a corner of the marsh
where an old strip of fence has folded itself under the surface—
broken pencil lead in nature’s skin.
All I want is joy—this is my unwhittled secret.
To be steady as unstained posts and sheet metal joints.
Heavy like water and heavy like wood.
From the other side of the window, I watch the one quietly learning
to surround the other. My grief, splintered and sunbaked.
Joy, rippling under the knees of the wind.
Yes, it’s beginning to be the only thing I can see.
(excerpt from The One Thing I Will Say When It Rains)
II. Elegy
A month ago,
she kept telling me
there is a roof on the world.
That it sits on top of all the trees
like a heavy stone. That she felt things
shaking
sometimes, and nothing
that falls on our heads is
brand new.
It all may look different,
but it lands on you the same,
like snow.
(excerpt from An Answering Machine Elegy for Aunt Mary, a previous version of which was published in Rufous City Review)