This poem is called "Listen."
"Cage's quartet number one, really, it's
a thoughtful, and engaging, and quite delightful work,
and not a bundle of cliches as once was thought.
So turn out the light, listen, the storm outdoors
accompanies everything tonight.
Wind drones in the television antenna on the roof, sleet
crashes against the windows.
The refrigerator kookilates as usual,
and the furnace does its booming and strutting below.
Inside the man's head, along with incessant yearning
for one more beautiful poem, and one more good look at a woman's
nakedness, is the perpetual noise caused by deteriorating
aural nerves, high-pitched, a baby cicada
wailing in its shell, Let me out, you fuckers, let me out.
And would anyone deny such a reasonable desire?
Well, really all of us would, and confinement
is part of the deal, wailing is part of the deal.
The cicada splits, and sings, and dies,
as every artist must go on, always
to dying, to what is new, repudiating what has been done
already, those remarkable and reasonable accomplishments
repudiating us.
But still one wishes that Cage had left Orientalism, which
at best is a kind of rot in the American mind,
to the academic musicians and had
continued to give us this confined mellow music
of suffering.
Listen, the wind makes its triads, the chilling nerve,
it's E above high C, and the cello drones in the night."
[APPLAUSE]