Premiered by the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, March 19th, 2022

Text:

Will it never be possible
to separate you from your greyness?
Must you be always sinking backward
into your grey-brown landscapes—and trees
always in the distance, always against a grey sky?

Must I be always
moving counter to you? Is there no place
where we can be at peace together
and the motion of our drawing apart
be altogether taken up?

I see myself
standing upon your shoulders touching
a grey, broken sky—
but you, weighted down with me,
yet gripping my ankles,—move
laboriously on,
where it is level and undisturbed by colors.

William Carlos Williams

I was first drawn to this stunning William Carlos Williams text because of the beautiful way it spoke to a phenomenon with which every Bay Area denizen is familiar: the fog. He uses the backdrop of “a grey, broken sky” to illustrate the growing distance between two people, and the landscape in which they grow inevitably apart. Their bodies and minds attract and repel each other, only for them to find themselves ultimately on different levels, at unreconcilable planes of perspective in the haunting final quatrain. The “greyness” Williams speaks of is so evocative and could symbolize many things: mental illness, divergent life paths, resentment, or simply the suffocating forces of existence with which we all grapple. In my setting, I see the greyness as the very thing tearing these people apart; the word being filled with the frustration and anguish the speaker feels at the ever-widening gap before them. The grey is not just grey but filled with all the colors of a complicated relationship coming to a close.