WEBVTT

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There's another kind
of version of this.

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Another trip in a musical
about the same subject.

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I wrote a series of
poems about Don Giovanni.

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All poets have to come to
grips with Don Giovanni.

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Why did he do it?

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[LAUGHTER]

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The guy was an aristocrat.

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Had all the money in the world.

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Fine education.

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Very handsome.

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Wanting to fool around
is understandable.

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Wanting to fool around
a lot is understandable.

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But to spend your whole life
just running from one seduction

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to another.

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Why would an intelligent man
give up his life to that?

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So I had a series of
songs in which he--

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it's like at the
end of the opera--

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the Mozart opera
at the end, he's

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pulled down by the Commendatore
on his way to hell.

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And I picture him in
a very Italian movie.

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Suddenly the curtain
comes down and you

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see then it segues, hands
to him-- cuts to him,

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is what I mean, and he's
walking down a little dirt back

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road in Italy singing, trying
to explain what he was going on.

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And he does it.

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Only this poem is just
a kind of a texture.

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It's not expository.

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There are other poems
that start-- one of them

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starts out, how could they
imagine women are recreation?

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It must be something
more than that.

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How could you think
that's what I was doing?

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But this one is--

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I don't know what it's-- oh,
it's called Don Giovanni on his

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Way to Hell.

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And it's a song.

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As a poet it's not a song, so.

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The oxen have voices,
the flowers are wounds.

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You never escape
from Tuscany noons

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that cripple with beauty
and butcher with love.

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Sing folly, flee,
sing going down.

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The moon is corroding,
the deer have gone lame,

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but you never escape the
incurably sane, uncrippled

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by beauty, unbutchered by love.

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Now it rains in your bowels.

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It rains though you weep
with terrible tameness.

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It rains in your
sleep and cripples

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with beauty and
butchers with love.

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You never recover.

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You never escape.

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And you mustn't endeavor
to find the mistake that

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cripples with beauty,
that butchers with love.

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Sing folly, flee,
sing going down.

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Sing maidens and towns.

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Ah, maidens and towns.

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Folly, flee, sing going down.

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