"What Music Measures."
This doesn't mention it in the poem,
but the boy who's playing the fiddle in this,
who I can't see at this moment here,
was about 11 or 12 years old.
And he's-- I didn't know it at the time,
but he was practicing his fiddle.
This is up in Bread Loaf, Vermont.
And it was just beautiful.
And later that night, he played for us with his dad
accompanying him on something else.
And he's known in those parts as a prodigy.
"What Music Measures."
"A meadow recently mown and vast.
I couldn't see the end of it, and I
can't say the exact moment because I was daydreaming
when the fiddle started up, mid tune of an Appalachian tune.
I couldn't see where it was coming from,
neither instrument nor player.
I could hear it.
But as soon as it was swallowed by my ears,
it was gone to wherever in the mind
music goes as one passage replaces another,
note after note, lively, as they first burst up from the fiddle.
And as they rose, they diminished,
and as beauty has its limits, disappeared without an echo
to remember them by.
When the music stopped, meadow, sky, all of it
seemed dull without whatever it was the music had measured."