I'd like to read two more poems.
I don't mean forever, I just mean for tonight.
We have a large picture window in our living
room, which looks out on the Green Mountains in Vermont.
And this poem is a meditation while looking out at the Green
Mountains at twilight when the mountains have become
a silhouette and one can see the line
that they make against the sky.
It's a poem meditating on that random image, that line
in nature that seems to come from nowhere and go nowhere,
can have no particular design.
Looking at that image while at the same time sitting
in the room and listening to a Mozart Piano Concerto,
the poem is attempt to mediate between that random sense
of nature and the controlled and shaped sense of human art.
I wanted to call it a double concerto for mountain
and orchestra, but I ended up calling it more simply "Looking
at a Mountain Range While Listening to a Mozart Piano
Concerto."
"Looking eastward through my picture window over the snow,
the sun just down, I see the mountain range
hazing to one shade of blue.
Now with the trees obscured, it is
a sweep of shape darkening so flat,
one might not recognize a mountain range at all.
Its silhouette is just a wandering line,
drawn by a hand that might be falling asleep or else so
free that every arc it makes of rise or fall
expresses the contentment that it feels at heart,
although it leads nowhere but on,
and might as well drift off into another range of further blue.
Brightly the piano asserts its melody.
The orchestra gathers its colors to reply,
true to the law that everything responds,
nothing is left unanswered, that variation extends the self
as if one's life were made essential in a piano's theme,
departing then returning one to what one is.
And now again it is the piano's turn,
and now the separate instruments, again as one,
move onward to their chosen end beyond which nothing else will
be desired.
And so my ears pulse back into themselves,
my eyes returned to seeing what they see,
the mountain's silhouette--
a floating line leading my sight where visible blue ends.
It is an end in thought--
my life goes on.
Here I am deciding what to play next as you appear.
Suddenly, I recall when I first saw you 20 years ago playing
your flute.
I think of waterfalls and moonlight,
orioles in cherry trees.
Your smile extends the silence of your pause,
and then, as if unsure where to go next,
you walk adagio past me out the door,
just as I hear the piano enter in.
The mountain's silhouette is now less sharp.
Something seems missing as the record ends,
spinning with a hiss that empty space must
make between the stars.
I move the needle to the start and light
the lamp above my chair.
There are no mountains anymore, only my reflection
in the picture window like a surgeon's X-ray, ghostly
and remote.
I hear the introduction once again.
The piano sings so freshly that I feel the reason why
the orchestra replies.
And you return, carrying the flute your fingers have not
graced for 20 years--
as if a poem had conjured up the past
to ease the fear of darkness and of chance.
The one star in the sky is not enough to light the mountain
range where darkness holds the shape my window frame provides.
Once more, for the strings' sake,
the piano states its theme, the violins are moved,
they love their part.
Although I cannot see the dark beyond my mountain's dark,
I won't leave love to chance.
I watch you in the window coming near
as if to the conclusion Mozart had in mind."