Good Bones
3 Poems By Maggie Smith
2022
for mezzo soprano, piano
Duration: 11 min.
Premiere: Julia Holoman (mezzo-soprano), Chris Vazan (piano); Aspen Music Festival “Opera Encounters”; Aspen CO; 13 Aug 2022
First Fall
I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark
morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores, their mottled,
paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves
rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you
on my chest. Stars smolder well
into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,
the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know
because I’ve named them
begin to end. Soon I’ll have another
season to offer you: frost soft
on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare
gray branches. The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back. I’m desperate for you
to love the world because I brought you here.
© 2012 Maggie Smith
Deer Field
My daughter wants to know where the deer are.
We used to see them across the street
from the airport's long-term parking lots,
before backhoes tore down the trees
and piled them in the grass. At the intersection
of Broad and James, I tell her all of this
was forest before we were born, and it was
full of deer, but they had to leave
when people cleared the land for buildings-
that gas station, that drug store--and roads,
like the one we're on now. She says
it makes her sad. The few bare trees left
are leafed with black birds, wings trembling
a little in the wind. The sky is a single sheet
of corrugated cloud--rippled but seamless
as if to prove it was not manufactured.
She doesn't ask what they are building
by the airport, in what we called Deer Field.
It doesn't matter. I have changed her.
I have given her the first in a long list
of disappointments, clearing away
a perfect, wild space in her to make room.
© 2012 Maggie Smith
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
© 2015 Maggie Smith
"First Fall," "Deer Field," and "Good Bones" are taken from Good Bones by Maggie Smith, Tupelo Press, Publisher, 2017. Used by permission.
After coaching with Renée Fleming
After coaching with Nico Muhly
At Aspen Wheeler Opera House with christopher Theofanidis and other Aspen Music Festival composers and performers