Three O'Sullivan Settings by Christopher Mortlock

Piece: Three O'Sullivan Settings (2024 NMB Commissioned Piece)
Movements: 1. Walking to Hospital, 2. Leaving Early, 3. In Your Sleep
Composer: Christopher Mortlock
Poet: Leanne O'Sullivan
Performers: Richard Seiler, Claire Vangelisti
Event: 8th New Music on the Bayou Festival
Date: June 8, 2024
Location: Emy-Lou Biedenharn Recital Hall, University of Louisiana at Monroe
Video: Joseph Ham
Audio: Westly Heflin
Text:
1. Walking to Hospital
How the autumn dawn burned through the misty broods and settled down in fire; how quickly the sun glittered my shadow, how my shadow cried, a moment, with joy. A light frost, a vision of light crackling down the maples, down the tinder ash. I was the good thief. I held my Love's sweet breath, his beautiful, intelligent gaze. I closed my eyes and he woke inside me. When I saw, he saw the inflamed world. A bird sang deeply from the gutter eaves. When I closed my eyes I was elsewhere. I walked through the fire of his sleep.
2. Leaving Early
My Love, tonight Fionnuala is your nurse. You'll hear her voice sing-song around the ward lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness. I heard that, in another life, she too journeyed through a storm, a kind of curse, with the ocean rising darkly around her, fierce with cold, and no resting place, only the frozen rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders. And no cure there but to wait it out. If, while I'm gone, your fever comes down--if the small, salt-laden shapes of her song appear as a first glimmer of earth-light, follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing. She will keep you safe beneath her wing.
3. In Your Sleep (After 'The Lark Ascending' by Ralph Vaughan Williams)
The moment the lark finally vanishes into the spread green sky of the forest is the moment you suddenly lift your bruised arm up, over your body, as though to show me the wing's eclipse, or the wing, or the season of your dream. And even as your hand lapses silent onto your chest, and your breath goes sluggish, I am already watching your feet prepare their slow first step under the sheet as the last notes of sunlight fall quiet, and you do not move again. My love, are you a bird reviving in a summer field? Was it the lark ascending that you heard, a ghost among its shy-hearted tunes? Yes. I heard the lark escaping, too.