Um, this actually, this is a new poem that
comes of dealing with so much sham, so much hollowness.
How do you deal with that?
The public world that feels empty and hollow,
and the private one in which we're losing friends.
Beloved irreplaceable people.
What in the world to make of all that hollowness and all
that loss.
And then I remembered the Greek myth of Pan and Syrinx.
Then the poem wrote itself.
If you don't recall it, or don't know the story,
briefly it goes that Pan, who is the goat footed god of nature
was very hot for a nymph named Syrinx.
She was desperate to escape him and then
maybe she was shouting me too.
She called on the river nymphs who transformed her
into a bed of reeds.
And it was from those reeds that Pan bound together
the musical instrument we call the pan pipes,
or the syrinx, which was one of the earliest woodwind
instruments.
The music lives on primarily in Peru.
The great players of the pan pipes.
And of all the songs of that region, the one
that took over this poem and its pan pipes, El Condor Pasa.
It's the most haunting of them all.
If you don't know it, you can hear it on YouTube.
"The uses of what is hollow.
El Condor Pasa, do you hear that haunting sound,
uncanny in its beauty?
Pan pipes of Peru that mime the sound of wind,
the spread of wings, the beauty of the condor high
above the Andes.
Glory in the past.
And when Pan thought he had captured her,
he held instead only the tall marsh reeds.
And made of hollow loss, a song.
And of the vultures circle overhead,
such music that every reed could sing when given breath.
Pure melody born of wind and emptiness.
So piercing and so high.
El Condor Pasa overhead.
Look up.
No, higher.
Do you see him now?
His wings out spread, the V that children draw when they
mean bird, and far, and sky.
The wonder gives the emptiness its size.
In search of death on which it feeds, and as it flies,
the pan pipes play.
The music is so lovely it could stop the breath."