And sometimes, I get a call.
And I got a call from Kentucky, from the conductor
of the Philharmonic.
And he says, we would like for you
to think about writing a poem on the last symphony of Gustav
Mahler, "Symphony Number 9" in D--
D major.
[LAUGHTER]
For sure.
Yeah.
I can do that.
Definitely.
I'm on it.
Man.
So of course, I had to listen to the symphony.
So I turned it on and I listened to that symphony.
And it's incredible.
You'll go into-- you'll go into galaxies.
It's such a forceful music.
You can feel the waves of space come at you.
You can feel yourself flying through that music
and that music enveloping you and taking you somewhere,
an incredible place.
So I was really, really taken by Gustav Mahler's last symphony,
"Number 9" in D major.
"Mahler-- Son Borne of the Street Song.
In the darkness, in the exile there is a sigh, a number nine.
There is a son borne of the street song.
The injured timpani red drum.
And there is a town, Jihlava, a makeshift theater
and rough cut street dancers.
There is a sky that welcomes him.
His furious strings tasking the universe,
his weaving of all things.
The piccolo and the flute, oboes of furies, tiny streams
of burning slow breath.
We wait in silence and face up, we
notice the heavens, the turbulence,
and wild, sharp strokes and pieces of banned color
and banned voices.
Their outcast Jewish hymn takes us
to the endless seas, unknown choruses, unknown winds
and collapsing worlds.
We enter.
We follow.
We halt. We are halted.
Vanishing harmonies.
You walk through quadrants of space, music.
What is it?
One note encompasses everything.
One oboe returns.
Why?
Your life, beginning.
Your life almost ending.
Then ending.
What do you hear in this vastness?
This movement before you?
Unknown forces whirl violins and the dead.
The director's arms and hands sway
shaking point dissolve, only still we stand now.
We only left alone now.
Only Gustav Mahler lives on by this bed.
This night, this day, this last cycle
falls into ever returning descent
of sound, a voice, a voice.
Do you hear it?
Hear it."
And then I sent it to the symphony.
[APPLAUSE]
And then they played it.
And it was part of the symphony.
The words and the music and Gustav Mahler
and his great most incredible composition
of that last-- very last symphony he wrote, No.
9 in D major.
I had to learn fast.
That's what's cool about getting requests and getting inspired.
You got to go to it.
You go, I never wrote about that.
Well, just take a step and dive in.
Just go in there and then we can we do it.
And that is so true of everything in our lives.
And how things get us going?
We start going, come on.
How could you do that?
How could this be happening?
And that's when it's time to write.
That's when it's time to write.
Qué está pasando, what's going on?
This is incredible.
This shouldn't be happening.
All those people-- all those people
shot and killed, young ones at the university.
How can this be?
And you know that's how we're feeling.
And that's when the time comes to write.
That's when the time comes to write.
That's when you take care of business.
That's right when-- that's when we take care of business.
That's what everybody here--
that's when we take care of business.
Because we want to take care of business,
we're going to take care of it.
OK.
We're not going to let it be like--
we're going to take care of business.
And the five families will know.
But we're going to take care of business.
So that's it.
That's how to do it.
And we all have a different way of doing it.
That's fine.
And so the poems are like that.
And this-- and this collection, that's how the poems are.
It's just the way it is.
Yeah.
And we have to wash that trauma away.
We have to wash it away and do it with our voices,
with our heart.
We can do it with our heart and our voices and our hand.
And we're just scribbling it and then using our voices.