And I'd like to read a poem of mine that's
called "Farewell" which I wrote-- the draft of it anyway
I wrote on the back of a program at a concert
when they were playing a symphony of Haydn's called
the Farewell Symphony, in which the parts begin ending
before the whole symphony ends.
And when any musicians part comes to an end
that musician is supposed to get off--
get up and creep off the stage so
that the orchestra diminishes in the course
of the last movement.
And in the old days the musician was
to blow out the candle on the music stand
and so the number of people on stage would diminish
and the light would just focus around them
until there were two violinists left.
And I wrote this thinking of my old friend Paul Zweig
who had died not so long before.
"Farewell."
"The last adagio begins.
Soon a violinist gets up and walks out.
Two cellists follow, bows erect, cellos dangling.
The flutist leaves lifting the flute
high to honor it for blowing during all
that continuous rubbing.
The bassoonist goes then the bass fiddler.
The fortepiano player abandons the black closeted contraption
and walks away shaking her fingertips.
The orchestra disappears, by ones the way
we wash up on this unmusical shore
and by twos, the way we enter the ark where
the world goes on beginning.
Before leaving, each player blows the glimmer
off the music stand candle, where fireweed, dense blazing
star, flame azalea stored it summers ago,
puffing that quantity of darkness
into the hall and the same portion of light
into the elsewhere where the players reassemble and wait
for the oboist to come with her reliable A.
As first light arrives in a beech and hemlock
forest setting the birds sounding their chaotic vowels,
so they can tune and then play.
The phrases inside flames wobbling
on top of stalks in the field, and in fireflies greenish
sparks of grass-sex, and in gnats whining
past in a spectral bunch, and in crickets
who would saw themselves apart to sing,
and in the golden finch perched in the mountain ash.
Now all the players have gone, but two violinists
who sit half facing each other.
Friends who have figured out what
they have figured out by sounding it upon the other
and scathed the final phrases.
By ones and twos our powers rise and go
to lie jangled up in stacks, in woodsheds, waiting
until a new winter to spring again
in crackling orange voices.
And only two are left.
In the darkness above the stage I
imagine the face of my old friend Paul Zweig
who went away, his powers intact into eternity's woods
under the double singing of birds.
Looking down and saying something
like, let the limits of knowing stretch and diaphanize.
Knowledge increasing into ignorance
gives the falling trajectory its grace.
The bow hairs still cast dust on the bruised wood.
Everything on Earth born only moments ago abruptly tips over
and is dragged by mistake into the chaotic inevitable.
Goodbye dear friend, even the meantime,
which is the holy time of being on Earth
in overlapping lifetimes.
And this is one of its endings.
The violinists scrape one more time.
The last of the adagio flies out through the F holes.
The audience struggles from the hall and at once disappears.
For myself, I go on foot on 7th Avenue
down to the little bent streets of the West Village.
From ahead of me comes the hick of somebody drunk
and then the nunc of his head bumping against a telephone
pole."