WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you, you're a
magnificently large audience.

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Thank you all for coming.

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I'm going to begin
with a poem called

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"A Tree Telling of Orpheus."

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I'd like to check on the
acoustics first though.

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Can you hear me
over there and back?

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"A Tree Telling of Orpheus."

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"White dawn.

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Stillness.

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When the rippling began, I
took it for sea-wind coming

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to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless--

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but the white fog didn't stir.

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The leaves of my brothers
remained outstretched,

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unmoving.

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Yet, the rippling drew nearer
and then my own outermost

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branches began to
tingle almost as if fire

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had been lit below
them, too close,

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and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.

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Yet, I was not afraid,
only deeply alert.

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I was the first to see him,
for I grew out on the pasture

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slope, beyond the forest.

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He was a man, it seemed--

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the two moving stems,
the short trunk,

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the two-arm branches flexible
each with five leafless

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twigs at their ends.

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And the head that's crowned
by brown or gold grass bearing

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a face not like the
beaked face of a bird,

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more like a flower's.

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He carried a burden made
of some cut branch bent

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while it was green, strands of a
vine tight stretched across it.

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From this, when he touched
it, and from his voice, which

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unlike the wind's voice had no
need of our leaves and branches

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to complete its sound,
came the ripple.

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But it was now no
longer a ripple,

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he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow.

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It was a wave that
bathed me as if rain

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rose from below and around
me instead of falling.

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And what I felt was no
longer a dry tingling.

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I seemed to be
singing as he sang,

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I seemed to know
what the lark knows,

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all my sap was mounting towards
the sun that by now had risen--

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the mist was rising,
the grass was drying,

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yet my roots felt music
moisten them deep under earth.

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He came still closer
leaned on my trunk.

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The bark thrilled like
a leaf still folded.

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Music.

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There was no twig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.

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Then as he sang,
it was no longer

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sounds only that
made the music, he

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spoke and as no tree
listens, I listened.

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And language came into my roots,
out of the Earth, into my bark,

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out of the air, into the
pores of my greenest shoots

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gently as dew.

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And there was no word he
sang, but I knew its meaning.

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He told of journeys of
where sun and moon go

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while we stand in dark,
of an earth journey

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he dreamed he would take
someday deeper than roots.

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He told of the dreams of
men, wars, passions, grief,

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and I, a tree, understood words.

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Ah, It seemed my
thick bark would

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split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring

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when a late frost warms it.

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Fire, he sang, that tree's
fear, and I, a tree,

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rejoiced in its flames.

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New buds broke forth from me
though it was full summer.

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As though his lyre,
now I knew its name,

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were both frost and
fire, its chords

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flamed up to the crown of me.

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I was seed again.

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I was fern in the swamp.

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I was coal.

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And at the heart of
my wood, so close

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I was to becoming
man or God, there

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was a kind of silence,
a kind of sickness,

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something akin to what men
call boredom, something--

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the poem descended a
scale, a stream over stones

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that gives to a candle
a coldness in the midst

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of its burning, he said.

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It was then, when in
the blaze of his power

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that reached me and changed me.

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I thought I should fall my
length, that the singer began

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to leave me.

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Slowly, moved from
my noon shadow

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to open light, words
leaping and dancing

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over his shoulders
back to me, reverie

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sweep of lyre tones becoming
slowly again ripple.

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And I in terror but
not in doubt of what

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I must do, in anguish, in
haste, wrenched from the Earth

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root after root, the soil
heaving and cracking,

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the moss tearing asunder
and behind me the others--

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my brothers
forgotten since dawn.

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In the forest,
they too had heard

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and were pulling their roots in
pain out of a thousand year's

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layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,

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breaking themselves
out of their depths.

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You would have thought we would
lose the sound of the lyre,

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of the singing so dreadful the
storm sounds were where there

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was no storm, no wind, but
the rush of our branches

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moving our trunks
resting the air.

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But the music, the
music reached us.

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Clumsily, stumbling
over our own roots,

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rustling our leaves in
answer, we moved, we followed.

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All day we followed
uphill and down.

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We learned to dance, for he
would stop where the ground was

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flat, and words
he said taught us

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to leap and to wind in and out
around one another in figures

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the lyre's measure designed.

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The singer laughed till he
wept to see us, he was so glad.

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At sunset, we came to
this place I stand in,

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this knoll with its ancient
grove that was bare grass then.

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In the last light of that
day, his song became farewell.

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He stilled our longing.

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He sang our sun-dried roots
back into earth, watered them--

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all night rain of music so
quiet we could almost not

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hear it in the moonless dark.

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By dawn, he was gone.

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We have stood here
since, in our new life.

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We have waited, he
does not return.

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It is said he made
his earth journey

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and lost what he sought.

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It is said they felled him and
cut up his limbs for firewood.

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And it is said his head
still sang and was swept out

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to sea singing.

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Perhaps, he will not return.

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But what we have lived,
comes back to us.

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We see more.

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We feel as our rings
increase, something

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that lifts our branches, that
stretches our furthest leaf

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tips further.

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The wind, the birds, do not
sound poorer but clearer,

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recalling our agony,
and the way we danced.

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The music."

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