THE SYMPHONY

Lukas Foss conducting from the keyboard

I usually sleep like a Philistine

Dragged there by his wife, drugged

With the business of poems in my head,

Waiting for intermission, to get down

To the bar for a beer or whiskey.

During Brahms, my soul-master,

I doze, dreaming of Dvořák, his New World

Symphony, or, during Schubert, my god,

I drift to a plateau of gauchos

Riding the pampas to a water-hole.

Once, I awakened: Bach's Fifth

Piano Concerto, the second movement cantiline,

That afternoon you played it, in memoriam,

For Kennedy. I wept and went home:

Wept, because no poem could say it;

Went home, because that was the place

To go, the place--how shall I say it--

Where I could put it, again and again, on the stereo