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Solo Voice
LGBTQ+ Music

he opens (2019)

5 queer love songs for baritone and piano

Text: Matthew Stepanic (b. 1990)
Duration: 14 minutes
Difficulty: Medium

Commissioned by Adam Arnold. First performed in New York City by Dicky Dutton and Michael Lewis in October 2019.

he opens was written as a companion piece to Schumann’s Dichterliebe—an intentionally queer work on the same themes of love & loss, intertwined with images of nature in bloom. Adam Arnold, who commissioned this work, put me in touch with Matthew Stepanic, an Edmonton-based queer poet who enthusiastically gave me free reign over his poetry. Stepanic’s words are lush and beautiful, but speak unambiguously about past male lovers, replete with sexual metaphors and embracing the emotional complexity of these relationships. Although each poem used in this cycle was written about a different person, the five poems together weave a single narrative of love and loss. Whereas Schumann’s cycle ends in sadness and despair, this cycle ends in peace and understanding—at the wedding day of his former lover, reconciling the past with his future.

The audio below is a live recording of the premiere performance by Dicky Dutton (baritone) and Michael Lewis (piano) in October 2019.

Full Text

I. he opens (after ee cummings)
your hand fidgets with mine the way
a flower closes & opens—
I am not certain you’ll stay.
a door is open until its latch
is secured firmly between its frame
& your open hand slips between
my fingers like water. you call me
thirsty, but I am enclosed in comfort
when we are entangled in my bed.
how do you measure the distance
between an open and closed hand?
can we use this branch you’ve placed
between our hearts? I fidget
with an origami flower, hold
its five petals to a point, release,
watch it blossom. a closed flower is
a constant effort when its stigma are eager
for pollen. & I do know if
your hand left mine, I would lock
like a bulb buried in a late frost.

II. In the hole
You tell me
I’m quite the catch
and I become a baseball:
rotund, unhollow, svelte skin.
In your bedroom
your thumb edges across my stitching.
I say, This is how I’m held together.
All of me supported in your palm.
You rescued me from sickle-hungry grasses
In your neighbour’s backyard, where
another had lobbed and abandoned me.
A sprinkler passed over
summer after summer after summer.
I am waiting for you now to
write your name on my body,
shift me into myth.
Yet you roll me on an open hand
and I hold my breath for
moment after moment after moment,
waiting to slip off the ends of your fingers
and roll under your bed.

III. When the graft doesn’t take
The space where I kept
you was only commodious for a summer & how could I have guessed
your heart was budding & branching toward an autumn
that would rust our leaves? I want to believe the frisson of a first kiss
binds every graft, but we all hold shears & stand as judge
to what will be pruned.
In a dream after,
I return to the edge of the tub where I watch you sculpt coifs of bubbles
& gently wash the body I had so eagerly filthed.
I inhale a garden as each glossy sphere pops. Water me,
I’m drying out, you say & suddenly I was always holding
the watering can.

IV. the no-contact rule
I carried your body to the pier
because it was expected & I was out
of words. It was my final time
with the weight of your body; later,
I would tell people the size, teetering
my hands between this and that big.

I poured out my water pitcher
into the ocean & still,
your body crests the water line,
boasting as the humpback does
for attention.

In the morning silence between
the pouring of coffee & its first sip,
I return to the shoreline.
You were right:
I was the one to ask you to disappear in water
& you, the one to return (again & again)
for a drink.

V. Fluvial processes
On your wedding day
I recall, We were the same river:
The southward break of the Saskatchewan,
a divining fork that slips
through its cities’ myths.

Though I followed its Cree origin
& flowed swiftly up the North Saskatchewan,
tales still drift between our mouths of
the boys whose toes touched our riverbeds
the men we’ve allowed to wash in our waters.

All good is banked in our basins.
Kicked up by future waders,
it clouds our streams so
we cannot see this love,
too, is made of the last.

I am sorry I’ve never had patience for
your many questions, your wide nets
I know now you only want to hold
the whole river & as a sieve,
drain away all but the gold.

You’ve found that patience in a riverman
whose care & attention are not pyrite,
who will pull that stone of fear from your bank,
polish it & placing it in your open palm,
prove that even this too can shine.

© Matthew Stepanic, 2019. Used with permission.