How blessed, how blessed a tailor to be!
Oh that I had been born a commercial traveller 
and engaged as baritone at the Opera! Oh that
I might give my Symphony its first performance
fifty years after my death!
—Mahler, 1904


I. Funeral March


Mahler, from his studio on the eleventh floor of the
Hotel Majestic, New York City, hears the cortege of a
fireman moving up Central Park West.


one roll of the drum

one road where the wind storms, where
Cherubim sing birds’ songs
with human faces and hold the world
in human hands and
drift on the gold road
where black wheels smash
all


one roll of the drum


II. Stormily agitated


to be a block of flowers
in a wood

to be mindlessly in flower
past understanding

to be shone on
endlessly

to be there, there
and blessed


III. Scherzo


one two three
one two three

little birds waltz to and fro
in the piano

at Maiernigg on the
Wörthersee

and up the tree:
cacophony

one two three


IV. Adagietto


one feels
one clematis petal
fell

its circle
is all

glimmer on this pale
river


V. Rondo-Finale


Schoenberg: “I should
even have liked to observe
how Mahler
knotted his tie,

and should have found that
more interesting and instructive
than learning how
one of our musical bigwigs composes
on a ‘sacred subject.’

…An apostle
who does not glow
preaches heresy.”

his tie was knotted
with éclat
on 
the dead run!