Billy Collins - Some Final Words lyrics

I cannot leave you without saying this: the past is nothing, a nonmemory, a phantom, a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss is composing another waltz no one can hear. It is a fabrication, best forgotten, a wellspring of sorrow that waters a field of bitter vegetation. Leave it behind. Take your head out of your hands and arise from the couch of melancholy where the window-light falls against your face and the sun rides across the autumn sky, steely behind the bare trees, glorious as the high strains of violins. But forget Strauss. And forget his younger brother, the poor ba*tard who was k**ed in a fall from a podium while conducting a symphony. Forget the past, forget the stunned audience on its feet, the absurdity of their formal clothes in the face of sudden d**h, forget their collective gasp, the murmur and huddle over the body, the creaking of the lowered curtain. Forget Strauss with that encore look in his eye and his tiresome industry: more than five hundred finished compositions! He even wrote a polka for his mother. That alone is enough to make me flee the past, evacuate its temples, and walk alone under the stars down these dark paths strewn with acorns, feeling nothing but the crisp October air, the swing of my arms and the rhythms of my stepping-- a man of the present who has forgotten every composer, every great battle, just me, a thin reed blowing in the night.