Poetry

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For Christine and Her Fiddle

I woke this morning to laughter coming through my wall and

thought of your fiddle, its breath and moods;

and you playing, wrist, fingers, and elbows

poised, chin tucked low—

making fire bird songs, midnight white star songs,

songs of the plunge and the return, lovers and hand holding,

songs to reckless boyhood, to unabandoned girlhood,

all youth in jeans with dirty knees, dirty fingers, snarled hair,

songs of life, as simple, as complex as Celtic knot work,

men and beasts of scale and no economy,

played in colors, played in twists and dearth and shades of the braided,

sad songs of drowning death on solid rock, of boats, Birlinns,

drunkards, fishermen and merrows, what the sea gives,

or gives to me, or you,  or takes, and takes from

all of us with no second glance,

and songs of misted beaches, washed with seaweed,

salted tubers and bracken drift;

and songs to white caps, hills, the sweet, lit sky above, all trees below,

firs, oaks, maples, hawthorn, trunks bent

to ivy-willed contortion, shinning, green ivy rope,

dark and deep and sharp smelling, roots which might pulverize bark,

lance brick, revert civilizations to reliance on fire and fiddles,

to fiddlers and their stories.

This morning, I rose to laughter coming through my wall and

in the window, high mountains filled my distance,

cold and blue, snow-covered.  I thought on you, your fiddle,

your fiddle case lined with old family pictures and maroon velvet.

Maroon: a color I might wear on my lips,

richness, sovereignty, the often color of laughter rising

from your bow and through my wall a woman’s delight.

The timber rose and fell sharp away.

Christine, Christine, Christine: maroon is the breath of your fiddle,

sovereign of many moods, lacquered, strung;

hollow as a mouth opened; filled with the expectant tongue of tunes,

and breath, and bated breath, and cool, cool breath,

hot beneath the teeth of bow on string,

tense as a spine riding-out gooseflesh,

the highs like flame-sorrow,

the lows like bellies of dew on spruce

or the memory of wood smoke.

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My Poetry

I

And he said,

if you inserted

a period do you think

people would go make tea?

II

Is it true

that

settling for less

means I’ll get less than I settle for?

Is

my outer world

a logical and creative

extension of my inner world?

III

I’m not psychologizing you,

He said

IV

Who would psychologize the poet

when the poem says,

I love you like I love the absence of periods?

V

What does a period mean

if not stop