[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, you're a magnificently large audience.
Thank you all for coming.
I'm going to begin with a poem called
"A Tree Telling of Orpheus."
I'd like to check on the acoustics first though.
Can you hear me over there and back?
"A Tree Telling of Orpheus."
"White dawn.
Stillness.
When the rippling began, I took it for sea-wind coming
to our valley with rumors of salt, of treeless--
but the white fog didn't stir.
The leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.
Yet, the rippling drew nearer and then my own outermost
branches began to tingle almost as if fire
had been lit below them, too close,
and their twig-tips were drying and curling.
Yet, I was not afraid, only deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the pasture
slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed--
the two moving stems, the short trunk,
the two-arm branches flexible each with five leafless
twigs at their ends.
And the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass bearing
a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of some cut branch bent
while it was green, strands of a vine tight stretched across it.
From this, when he touched it, and from his voice, which
unlike the wind's voice had no need of our leaves and branches
to complete its sound, came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple,
he had come near and stopped in my first shadow.
It was a wave that bathed me as if rain
rose from below and around me instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling.
I seemed to be singing as he sang,
I seemed to know what the lark knows,
all my sap was mounting towards the sun that by now had risen--
the mist was rising, the grass was drying,
yet my roots felt music moisten them deep under earth.
He came still closer leaned on my trunk.
The bark thrilled like a leaf still folded.
Music.
There was no twig of me not trembling with joy and fear.
Then as he sang, it was no longer
sounds only that made the music, he
spoke and as no tree listens, I listened.
And language came into my roots, out of the Earth, into my bark,
out of the air, into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew.
And there was no word he sang, but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys of where sun and moon go
while we stand in dark, of an earth journey
he dreamed he would take someday deeper than roots.
He told of the dreams of men, wars, passions, grief,
and I, a tree, understood words.
Ah, It seemed my thick bark would
split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost warms it.
Fire, he sang, that tree's fear, and I, a tree,
rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre, now I knew its name,
were both frost and fire, its chords
flamed up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
And at the heart of my wood, so close
I was to becoming man or God, there
was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
something akin to what men call boredom, something--
the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones
that gives to a candle a coldness in the midst
of its burning, he said.
It was then, when in the blaze of his power
that reached me and changed me.
I thought I should fall my length, that the singer began
to leave me.
Slowly, moved from my noon shadow
to open light, words leaping and dancing
over his shoulders back to me, reverie
sweep of lyre tones becoming slowly again ripple.
And I in terror but not in doubt of what
I must do, in anguish, in haste, wrenched from the Earth
root after root, the soil heaving and cracking,
the moss tearing asunder and behind me the others--
my brothers forgotten since dawn.
In the forest, they too had heard
and were pulling their roots in pain out of a thousand year's
layers of dead leaves, rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves out of their depths.
You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing so dreadful the storm sounds were where there
was no storm, no wind, but the rush of our branches
moving our trunks resting the air.
But the music, the music reached us.
Clumsily, stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves in answer, we moved, we followed.
All day we followed uphill and down.
We learned to dance, for he would stop where the ground was
flat, and words he said taught us
to leap and to wind in and out around one another in figures
the lyre's measure designed.
The singer laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
At sunset, we came to this place I stand in,
this knoll with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
In the last light of that day, his song became farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth, watered them--
all night rain of music so quiet we could almost not
hear it in the moonless dark.
By dawn, he was gone.
We have stood here since, in our new life.
We have waited, he does not return.
It is said he made his earth journey
and lost what he sought.
It is said they felled him and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said his head still sang and was swept out
to sea singing.
Perhaps, he will not return.
But what we have lived, comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel as our rings increase, something
that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest leaf
tips further.
The wind, the birds, do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music."