The Foundling
for choir SSATBB, string
quartet and vibraphone (1997)
duration: 24’
text by Ross Baglin
GRT • 045
audio sample
4: The City
score
available from
Australian Music
Centre
text
A headlight's
wish,
The sting of pleasure,
Drifting into rain -
Behind a bus-stop,
Wrapped in ghoulish trees
And the bright, amnesiac dreams
Of needles, mother felt you
Shaken from a rushed kiss,
And a halogen angel, sparkling
Over beaded glass
Swept past your imagining.
The cells knew what came next ;
Fluid as the bow
Upon the issuing string,
Indelible and adipose
A genesis in oxygen ;
The heart-bud forged on petty blooms,
The fish-comb back, the doughy head
bowed into prayer, you lay
Like a boat in a lock, between two levels
Of unquestioned time, and slept
In your possible futures, each rejoicing
In your gift.
Love, in the
end, is the adoption we all seek
Of strangers, waking in the light of a
door
Around you the city drools
Exhaust, and fog, and tar,
And millions lie alarmed for work,
Primed for the pilgrim hour ; for now,
Calm in the accent of another heart,
No sound betrays you to the bonfire city,
Burning to proclaim itself your destiny,
Until the circulation of the clock
Has overtaken sleep, obsessive cells
Complete the work, and you awake divorced
Toward the doorlight, and the wet street
Where the moon reads, wavering
Into nightsong, as atomic towers
Blaze and boom and office blocks
Host victory parties to commemorate
Some certainty with cash or armies
Proven at the border; Above, an ABC announcer
Opulently wilts agreement, fireworks
Weep coloratura tears of light.
Soon, there is jealousy on inward roads
Where no-one speaks
In respect of the day's long argument
Conducted daily, to no conclusion :
That children are ungrateful
Compared to ravens, that love
Is tapping at the wall of your cell,
That tonight again you will lie in bed
Like a switchboard, with a tangle of voices
Awaiting connection inside your head,
These are the facts, the evidence
Brought back from the interior,
Beyond appeal or disputation.
Tonight you will lie again in bed
And the rain will tell you all it knows
As evening purses in the west, and smoothes
Indented streets, and a tram,
Like a percussive sonata, sweeps
Down lines that rose-paned windows never guess.
In space, a
blue pearl dreams below the frost
Of ancient stars reciting zodiacs,
Over and over, until at last its answer shines
Love, in the end, is the adoption we all seek
Of strangers, waking in the light of a
door
A halogen angel, an ark
Of the hopeful, a sun that trails
Orphaned and deforming
Into the windless years behind.
In you, and I, time's circuit breaks
And its light ends ; a lamp
Carves yellow shade upon your bed
Here at the end of years, where tents
Of oxygen enfold a human face,
And others tour the cold linoleum
In chequered blanket and orthotic chair;
Your memory, by now's a hall of empty frames
Adjusted by others, reaching out
For what's behind you, for the childish
Laughter on the stair, a falling flare
In alien skies. Though none of us outlast
The accident of birth, any night
May see a headlight torn
To rivulets, in perspex
By a bus-stop, trees
And lovers' breath -
A planet in a tent
Of oxygen
Replenishing its foundling cry.