Born like the pines to sing,
   The harp and song in m’ breast,
Though far and near,
There’s none to hear,
I’ll sing as th’ winds request.
To tell the trend of m’ lay,
   Is not for th’ harp or me;
I’m only to know,
From the winds…

A man steps out of sunlight,
sunlight that streams like grace,
still gaping at blue sky
staked across the emptiness of space,
into a history where shadows
assume a human face.
A man slips into silence
that began as a cry,
still trailing music
although reduced to the sigh
of…

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for…

The music was already turning sad,
      those fresh-faced voices singing in a round
            the lie that time could set its needle back
and play from the beginning. Had you lived
      to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might
            have broken from the circle of that…

“I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she,
      “All the old tunes I know,—
Those I learnt ever so long ago.”
—Why she should think just then she’d play them
       Silence cloaks like snow.
When I returned from the town at nightfall
      Notes…

The subtlest strain a great musician weaves,
Cannot attain in rhythmic harmony
To music in his soul. May it not be
Celestial lyres send hints to him? He grieves
That half the sweetness of the song, he leaves
Unheard in the transition. Thus do we
Yearn…

Let my music be found wanting
in comparison
to yours (as it must)
let me be found loving
(as you were)
extravagantly the beautiful
let me find you
and the song (forever)
between us
in these terrible times

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long…

I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.
After “We acoustic banjo disciples!” Jebediah said, “When
and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers
come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?”
We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned…

I play the egg
and I play the triangle
I play the reed
and I play each angle
I play the lyre
and I play the lute
I play the snare
and I play the flute
I play the licorice stick
and I play the juke
I play the kettle
and…

Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest,
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my…

Let me make the songs for the people,
   Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
   Wherever they are sung.
 
Not for the clashing of sabres,
   For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
  …

First hold the needle
     like a lover’s hand
Lower it slowly
     let it tongue
     the record’s ear
Then cultivate
     the sweet beats
     blooming in the valley
     of the groove
Laugh at folks
     that make requests
What chef…

Two guitars were left in a room all alone
They sat on different corners of the parlor
In this solitude they started talking to each other
My strings are tight and full of tears
The man who plays me has no heart
I have seen…

The piano has crawled into the quarry. Hauled   
In last night for firewood, sprawled
With frozen barrels, crates and sticks,
The piano is waiting for the axe.
Legless, a black box, still polished;   
It lies on its belly like a lizard,   
Droning, heaving, hardly fashioned   
For the…

He never saw a violin.
But he saw a lifetime of violence.
This is not to presume
That if he had simply seen
A violin he would have seen
Less violence. Or that living among
Violins, as though they were
Boulangeries or toppling stacks
Of other glazed goods…