The Poet

I lay forever, didn’t I, behind those old windows / listening to Bach and resurrecting my life. / I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes
while the violins shrieked and the cellos trembled. / It was a crazy youth, wasn’t it?, letting / my mind soar like that, giving myself / up to the poetry the way I did.
It was a little like Goethe’s, wasn’t it, / a little like Eugene O’Neill’s, one joyous / sadness after another. That was the everlasting / life, wasn’t it. The true world without end.

Vivaldi Years – Gerald Stern