Do not finish the song,
Do not follow the tune,
For the forest keeps a mouth
That opens after moon

He came with a fiddle of willow bone,
A cloak of rain and road
He sang for bread, he sang for wine,
And every debt he owed

His voice could lift a funeral veil,
Could turn a curse to rain
But winter took him by the throat
And left no wound, no stain

Only a silence where his songs
Were once a living sea
Only a bow, a waiting string,
And hands that could not free

O minstrel, where has your singing gone?
The cup is full, the night is long
The bow still waits, the strings still ache,
But no human breath can make them wake

O minstrel, lay your sorrow down
Where Lachryma wears its root like a crown
If you cannot sing, then weep instead,
And let the branches wake the dead

He carried his unfinished song
Folded beneath his coat
Three verses for a wandering girl,
One chorus in his throat

A song of roads that part,
Of doors left painted blue
Of lovers growing old apart
And still keeping one chair new

He tried to hum it in the rain,
He tried beside the well
But every note became a stone
And every stone just fell

So to the hill of Lachryma
He climbed without a guide
And pressed his fiddle to the bark
As if the tree had died

Ah-ah, ah-ah,
The root drinks low
Ah-ah, ah-ah,
The lost songs grow

The forest held its breath that night,
No fox, no owl, no stream
The moon hung thin between the boughs
Like someone else’s dream

Then from the branch above his head,
Without a hand or breeze,
A trembling passed through every twig
And shivered through the leaves

The fiddle answered from the bark,
The hollow trunk replied
And all the song he could not sing
Rose up from every side

Not in his voice, not in his name,
Not warm enough for men
But close enough that he could weep
And hear himself again

He laughed then
Not loudly
Not happily

Only enough to say:
“So this is where songs go
when the throat becomes a grave.”

And the tree answered him
with the fourth verse

But no one living remembers it

At dawn they found his fiddle there,
Its strings all silver-white
His cloak was hanging from a limb
Still heavy with the night

They never found the minstrel’s bones,
Nor boot, nor ring, nor scar
But every spring, the young leaves shook
Like notes from very far

Since then, the travelers passing through
Are warned beside the fire:
“If you hear a song among the pines,
Do not complete the choir”

For those who sing the final line
Are taken by the sound
They walk until their names grow thin
And vanish underground

O minstrel, play what cannot end,
The broken note, the absent friend
The half-made hymn, the swallowed cry,
The tune that never learned to die

O minstrel, under Lachryma,
Your silence grew into a law
No traveler sings the ending true,
For the last line still belongs to you

Do not finish the song,
Do not follow the tune,
For the forest keeps a mouth
That opens after moon

And if the road should bend...
And if the night should...