An indescribable sadness hung over
These shifting forms and structures.
The hopelessness of passing time
And the melancholy
Of unalterable past events.
Quiet over the hilltops now,
Woodland birdsong ceased.
Alone
beneath the sky I stand again.
Wait, weary one:
Soon, like these,
We may also cease.

Age,
And separation,
And cold.
When winter comes
Where shall I find
The shadows of the earth?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold.
In the wind
The weather-vanes rattle.

The painful discrepancy
Between the ideal and the real.
The melancholic nostalgia of Brahms.
A wind upon the open fields
Like a burnt offering.
The banished one listens
In his night-dark lair
To the songs of the ancient ones.
An old, old fable haunts me,
And will not let me rest.

Intrumental

The cry essaying the waters;
The autumn gale that bites the vine
And announces the new wine.
In the forest I dreamed of
One hundred blossoming roses.
A scent of sunshine
Shields what is yet to unfold.

The irreality of the past,
Its nonexistence;
Obscured by reverberations in all directions
Calling from across the rotting sea
From an endless desert
Where nothing can grow.
Smothered by what, in the mind,
Has grown so powerful and unbearable.
Something so long dead.

A plague of nostalgia for a fictive past,
Not merely dead, never born,
Is the most desperate form of escapism.
Accident of birth, the pride of the insipid.
Blood still runs, rose-tinted,
Spilling on the red rock
In starvation and waste
In fanfares
And marches
And broad arching melody.
Wastelands ruled by ruined kings.
Curses never lifted.