Dakota songs: set I, for soprano and guitar

Dakota songs: Set I. For soprano and guitar. [Music by Bryan Beaumont Hays]. [Set to] Poems of Kathleen Norris. Five songs in set I: 1. Taking the blue -- 2. Stranded in Mobridge by a spring blizzard -- 3. Calentures -- 4. Calentures north -- 5. New year's eve in Bismarck, North Dakota. Dedication: for David. 1. Taking the blue: Trees gossip in the ghost-light. Early stars climb the sky and breeze descends, touching my arm lightly, like my grandmother at the last. 2. Stranded in Mobridge by a spring blizzard: She listens - ice cracking, gutters filling - and smiles to herself at the three-day storm, stockings on a chair, newspapers from another city on the floor. 3. Calentures: The fields appeared running like old dogs through our nights and days. We ran them dog-faced, not caring where the Pleiades lay, or the North Star: jeweled fields, where once we lay in darkness, our love around us. 4. Calentures - north: Weddings are difficult: the brides of April, cut flowers in their arms, white lilac budding before the final, killing frost. I sailed away, past rhythms of land, as storms advanced on the plain and butterflies mated above a chasm. 5. New year's eve in Bismarck, North Dakota: Flying in before snow closed the airport, waiting for a way out, drinking at the Patterson, peppermint schnapps for the season, the town, the storm. Norris, Kathleen guitar soprano 222 total; 1 (57), 2 (36), 3 (48), 4 (22), 5 (59) Song cycles.