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Snow White Turns Sixty

by Gillian Hollis & Dale Trumbore

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1.
Joy 01:44
JOY I am wild, I will sing to the trees, I will sing to the stars in the sky, I love, I am loved, he is mine, Now at last I can die! I am sandaled with wind and with flame, I have heart-fire and singing to give, I can tread on the grass or the stars, Now at last I can live! —Sara Teasdale
2.
The Kiss 01:07
THE KISS I hoped that he would love me, And he has kissed my mouth, But I am like a stricken bird That cannot reach the south. For though I know he loves me, Tonight my heart is sad; His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had. —Sara Teasdale
3.
November 02:00
NOVEMBER The world is tired, the year is old, The fading leaves are glad to die, The wind goes shivering with cold Where the brown reeds are dry. Our love is dying like the grass, And we who kissed grow coldly kind, Half glad to see our old love pass Like leaves along the wind. —Sara Teasdale
4.
Prayer 02:15
PRAYER Until I lose my soul and lie Blind to the beauty of the earth, Deaf though shouting wind goes by, Dumb in a storm of mirth; Until my heart is quenched at length And I have left the land of men, Oh, let me love with all my strength Careless if I am loved again. —Sara Teasdale
5.
SNOW WHITE TURNS SIXTY and doesn’t care any more about what the neighbors think. The prince just sits there, in his recliner, flicking channels, popping brewskis. Belches. He got downsized last year from The Royal Kingdom. Too young for social security; too old for another career. She just doesn’t care. They haven’t touched in years. The kids are grown, the house runs itself, and who wants to go to another ball or support another charity? She’s into: yoga, organic gardening, book club. She’s highlighting her hair, lifting weights, feels better about her body than she has in years. She sees the future roll out ahead, a road through the woods in autumn, yellow leaves scattered on the ground. There might be a snug little cottage, just for one. Maybe a cat curled by the chimney, soft as smoke. And a kettle on for tea. Pull up a chair and listen. You won’t believe her story. —Barbara Crooker
6.
WHERE'S WOLF? Where are you, my wild, my hazard, my gilded eye? With your ears like inside-out peaches, your tongue a washcloth’s linen. I’ve brought you merlot in the picnic basket you loved to pick through, I’ve brought you cranberries, recalling how lavishly you licked their juice from my thumbs. This was the path where we agreed to rendezvous, this the pine. I’m easy to spot, my lips in Ruby Butter gloss, I’m on time. I met a man in town who resembles you but too salon-sleek, without your mossy smell, your silent feet. He sent carnations round to mother’s place. I won’t settle for mannered inoffensiveness. I want moon-witnessed trysts, wind battling my body, the bed of needles, bark. The rogue happiness we captured once. O where o where have you hidden since? —Jeanne Marie Beaumont
7.
AFRAID TO LOOK AFRAID TO LOOK AWAY Moonlight breaks on the fir trees in the deep forest she waits for you. The garden of stones casts shadows hover on the ground. The breadcrumbs are the old trail of pebbles is white in the moonlight has no beginning. Leave this false trail and all trails: walk toward what you don’t know the moon will take you there. The house is gingerbread and sugar will fill you up at first. You will think you have found childhood. But she is inside what you eat devours you. Stay with her, let her feed you as she will stoke her oven. Keep your brother safe from her dim eyes cannot see you Wait for her to go to the fire will move you. You must stay and watch her burn if you forget and look away you will forget. Now the fire burns on in the garden you wake the stones. —Kathleen Jesme
8.
Gretel 01:35
GRETEL It was like waking up. One minute she was doing as she was told, stoking the fire so Hansel could go into the pot, the next hearing a tiny voice inside : Push her into the fire, it said, Push the mother. Push her hard as you can into her own fire so it will consume her. Her hands then, on the witch, like they had been on the sweets she’d won them over with, only pushing away this time, unlocking the cage of addiction that held them both. —Eileen Moeller
9.
SLEEPING BEAUTY Like a frog out of the water, like a big clumsy fly caught in a screen, I entered womanhood flailing my long legs. Jumping Double Dutch, in sneakered feet pounding a Morse Code of denial into the sidewalk, so it echoed throughout the neighborhood: not me, it said, not me, I'll play with dolls forever, I'll be a boy if I want to, I'll go off and play by the railroad tracks. Or spinning crazy like a top in the grass of the backyard, almost mowing mother's roses down with my arms, then swooning beneath our peach tree heavy with ripe fruit. Dizzy it always made me dizzy, and sleepy too, this newly tilting pigeon thrumming inside me. Thought I'd never want a prince bending over me his face so much like a brother's with its teasing wheedling eyes and mouth that kisses too hard. —Eileen Moeller
10.
RAPUNZEL AFTER HER MARRIAGE Every morning in front of the mirror I take the silver scissors and cut my hair and my daughter's shorter the hand-maidens, the ladies all snigger behind their veils the queen gifts us with emerald-encrusted combs pleads with me to stop this daily snip my husband, my prince, talks soft in my ears tells me we are safe but all those years I yanked brush through tangles snarled in pain all the years my neck bent with the weight of wet washed hair all the hours sitting still waiting within the spreadcircle of hair a heavy cloak I could not set aside It was not Dame Gothel's heavy climb or you dear husband that burdened my head but the braided ropes tying my time in care now my daughter runs hind-swift and I, tower free lock free gladly light headed —Eve Rifkah
11.
BLUEBEARD'S WIFE Stood on the dock and shrugged her shoulders, shawl close, as red birds fluttered across her eyelids, his shaving brushes strewn across the cobblestones behind her like little fish spilled from a bucket, flip-flopping, gasping for air in the purple twilight. The lanterns outside The Customs House made them look so much like body parts, fresh cut, headless knobs, submerged arms, and knees, hair like kelpy fronds, and thin cattail bones, all caught in a vat of cherry amber. No help for it. No help for it. She stood tall and still as a heron preening, eyes on a ship at anchor down the quay, keening, his razor a slice of moonlight in her hand. Soon she would have it speak his name. —Eileen Moeller
12.
THE MERMAID STORY We’ve all heard half of the fairy tale: A mermaid rescued a drowning prince, swam him to shore, then pined away because she missed the weight of him and the heat of his breath against her neck; nothing at all like the trickle of cool saltwater flushed from delicate gills when she kissed the mermen back in school. But since there are witches underwater as well as over, within a year she’d bargained away her tail for legs— and her tongue, too, as legs were dear. She married the prince. His body hair tickled like beach grass parched in sun. An eel grew where his legs forked. (She couldn’t speak this to anyone.) —Julie Kane
13.
FOR THE NIXIE What do you want from me? Why do I need to comb Power of this black hair, Power of this metal voice, And play the flute, or spin At the edge of your drowning home? Power of this black hair, Power of this metal voice, I am not the same. I have turned hard as a toad. Power of this black hair, Power of this metal voice, I’ll raise him back alive Out of your swimming air. I will only be a wife again At the end of a hard, equal road. Power of this black hair, Power of this metal voice, Nixie, I can send A song down through the water. (It will reach your home.) (I have been your daughter.) —Annie Finch
14.
HAZEL TELLS LAVERNE last night im cleanin out my
 howard johnsons ladies room when all of a sudden
 up pops this frog
 musta come from the sewer
 swimmin aroun an tryin ta climb up the sida the bowl so i goes ta flushm down but sohelpmegod he starts talkin
 bout a golden ball
 an how i can be a princess
 me a princess
 well my mouth drops
 all the way to the floor
 an he says
 kiss me just kiss me once on the nose
 well i screams ya little green pervert
 an i hitsm with my mop an has ta flush the toilet down three times
 me
 a princess —Katharyn Howd Machan
15.
Masquerade 03:09
MASQUERADE Ladies' slippers bloom: pouchy satin on waxy roots, but no one now wears dancing shoes. The ball is over, Cinderella, the stars are blown out. The prince wears velvet sneakers, a media man, his glossy image tacked on every tree. Glass cuts deep in your veins when your life is spent dancing to the ragged beat of the band. The matched pearls grow cold on your windpipe; the cummerbund reticulates and swallows to the rhythm of the dance. It's past midnight now, tired lady. The pink slippers glow in the dark, spent weapons of the betrayers. The black velvet night is all you need on your bare damask skin. —Barbara Crooker
16.
KINDER- UND HAUSMARCHEN Saint Nikolaus had a giant gunny sack to put the children in if they were bad. It was a hole so deep you'd never come back. A porch swing full of stories, where the smoke went up in hot, concentric, perfect rings and filled our heads with unbelievable things. A nursery heavy with a history where nothing was whatever it had seemed, where Aschenputtel's sisters cut their feet half off — so desperate they were to fit. And in the end, they also lost their eyes when steel–grey birds descended from the skies. Rotkäppchen's wolf was someone that she knew, who wooed her with a man's words in the woods. But she escaped. It always struck me most how Grandmother, whose world was swallowed whole, leapt fully formed out of the wolf alive. Her will came down the decades to survive in mine — my heart still desperately believes the stories where somebody re–conceives herself, emerges from the hidden belly, the warring home dug deep inside the city. We live today those stories we were told. Es war einmal im tiefen tiefen Wald. —Diane Thiel
17.
Evening 01:55
EVENING I walk home at sundown. The light strikes the telephone wires full on, and the cables blaze as if from inside. For instant, I’m sure it’s true— that November has fired up the veins of everything— that I, too, am briefly bright this way, and falsely transparent; a vessel for some joy I haven’t learned to make myself, or bear, or give. —Robin Myers
18.
UNION SQUARE STATION After all the fervor—all the search for words, the reach for flesh, the warmth of both, or just a way to cope with what they do— and after all the space that's left when sought, whether found or not, I think, standing in the empty subway stop, while a lone cellist bows his low harmonics into the cave, that this, too, must be desire: reaching out not to the player, nor with any fire, but to the train: Be slow and far away. Let me stay with this raw sound humming in my lungs. Make me wait. Never come. —Robin Myers
19.
This Morning 03:32
THIS MORNING This morning, still, winter waking, kicking off the quilt. Till now, unthinking waiting, cupping in the quiet I will stretch from—the plant uncurling toward the glass, the light gone strong enough to break it, vines reaching to it not from wanting, just not knowing how not to. Dust shifting in the sun of the air, floor waiting for the bright that stains it. What is it, this thirst in the lungs, a breath pulled tight as the shade snapped up to let it in, this waking, this dense nothing of warmth across the rug, this sweet mourning. —Robin Myers

credits

released September 20, 2011

All tracks composed by Dale Trumbore. Recorded June 29-July 1, 2011 by Gillian Hollis, soprano & Dale Trumbore, piano, with John Baffa of TV Tray Studio. Artwork by Jackie Littman. Produced by Dale Trumbore for Dissonant Gorgeous Productions, LLC.

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Dale Trumbore Los Angeles, California

Dale Trumbore is a composer and writer whose music has been called "devastatingly beautiful" (The Washington Post) and praised for its "soaring melodies and beguiling harmonies" (The New York Times). Trumbore's compositions have been performed by the Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW ensemble, Conspirare & the Miró Quartet, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Modesto Symphony, & Pasadena Symphony. ... more

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