The Relaxed Abalone

Abalone1
This is the first in my series of what I’m calling “Art Songs”.  Taking a cue from Charles Ives, these are piano and vocal pieces, the text being various pieces of poetry set to music.  The text for this piece is an example of “found” poetry which poet Rosemary Waldrop came across in The Joy of Cooking and arranged as verse:

Abalone, like inkfish,
needs prodigious pounding
if it has died in a state
of tension.