WEBVTT

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And I'd like to read
a poem of mine that's

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called "Farewell" which I
wrote-- the draft of it anyway

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I wrote on the back of
a program at a concert

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when they were playing a
symphony of Haydn's called

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the Farewell Symphony, in
which the parts begin ending

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before the whole symphony ends.

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And when any musicians
part comes to an end

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that musician is
supposed to get off--

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get up and creep
off the stage so

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that the orchestra
diminishes in the course

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of the last movement.

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And in the old days
the musician was

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to blow out the candle
on the music stand

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and so the number of people
on stage would diminish

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and the light would
just focus around them

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until there were
two violinists left.

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And I wrote this thinking
of my old friend Paul Zweig

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who had died not so long before.

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"Farewell."

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"The last adagio begins.

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Soon a violinist gets
up and walks out.

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Two cellists follow, bows
erect, cellos dangling.

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The flutist leaves
lifting the flute

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high to honor it for
blowing during all

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that continuous rubbing.

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The bassoonist goes
then the bass fiddler.

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The fortepiano player abandons
the black closeted contraption

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and walks away shaking
her fingertips.

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The orchestra disappears,
by ones the way

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we wash up on this
unmusical shore

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and by twos, the way
we enter the ark where

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the world goes on beginning.

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Before leaving, each
player blows the glimmer

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off the music stand candle,
where fireweed, dense blazing

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star, flame azalea
stored it summers ago,

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puffing that
quantity of darkness

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into the hall and the
same portion of light

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into the elsewhere where the
players reassemble and wait

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for the oboist to come
with her reliable A.

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As first light arrives
in a beech and hemlock

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forest setting the birds
sounding their chaotic vowels,

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so they can tune and then play.

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The phrases inside
flames wobbling

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on top of stalks in the field,
and in fireflies greenish

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sparks of grass-sex,
and in gnats whining

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past in a spectral
bunch, and in crickets

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who would saw themselves
apart to sing,

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and in the golden finch
perched in the mountain ash.

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Now all the players have
gone, but two violinists

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who sit half facing each other.

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Friends who have
figured out what

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they have figured out by
sounding it upon the other

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and scathed the final phrases.

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By ones and twos our
powers rise and go

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to lie jangled up in stacks,
in woodsheds, waiting

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until a new winter
to spring again

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in crackling orange voices.

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And only two are left.

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In the darkness
above the stage I

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imagine the face of my
old friend Paul Zweig

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who went away, his powers
intact into eternity's woods

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under the double
singing of birds.

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Looking down and
saying something

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like, let the limits of
knowing stretch and diaphanize.

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Knowledge increasing
into ignorance

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gives the falling
trajectory its grace.

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The bow hairs still cast
dust on the bruised wood.

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Everything on Earth born only
moments ago abruptly tips over

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and is dragged by mistake
into the chaotic inevitable.

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Goodbye dear friend,
even the meantime,

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which is the holy
time of being on Earth

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in overlapping lifetimes.

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And this is one of its endings.

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The violinists
scrape one more time.

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The last of the adagio flies
out through the F holes.

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The audience struggles from the
hall and at once disappears.

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For myself, I go on
foot on 7th Avenue

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down to the little bent
streets of the West Village.

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From ahead of me comes
the hick of somebody drunk

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and then the nunc of his head
bumping against a telephone

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pole."

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