Do It While You're Warm

You tell yourself you’ve got the stuff
you’ll need to broach the specificities
of the infinity you now approach:
Schumann’s symphony, his first, the “Spring,”
will be the mad ebulliently youthful thing

that next requires your aging bow – and oh! –
you’ll try to see the enterprise of playing it
as one extravagant investigation
rather than an invitation to plunge back into
that old inequitable woe (in which you take

your fiddle out and wonder how on heaven,
earth or hell to make it go): perhaps
this time you’ll quickly burst right through
the war and sway and burble happily
and lead the section of first violins placed

in your charge as if you’d found a life, at last,
enlarged, you could adore – look into
every passing color: will and trill it into form.
You’ve still got something left, and you
won’t always. Do it while you’re warm.

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