"How Slow the Wind [soprano and string quartet, on a text adapted from poetry by Emily Dickinson] is in memory of a friend, Mariel Stubrin,"_says Golijov. "[She] died in an accident while driving in the south of Chile (a landscape similar to northern California) in January 2001. It is about sudden death, about an instant in which life turns upside down, unlike a process of slow death. I think that Emily Dickinson's words could be understood like that. I imagine that those words could represent the feeling that Mariel's husband, Dario (a friend of mine since childhood), felt the minute after the accident. The voice is a call from a flying spirit, and the strings are the wind."

How slow the wind

How slow the sea

Is it too late to touch you dear?

How slow the wind

How slow the sea

We this moment knew

Love marine and love terrene

Love celestial too

Oh, how late their feathers be