The Fiddler of Driskill Hill: Poems

The Singing Wires

 The Singing Wires Saline, Bienville Parish, north Louisiana, December 1960 The Christmas giving over, he strolled in the great mundane, Sad aftermath to wonder, the same old world again, A boy not yet twelve but with a man’s imagination, Waiting for the muse’s fatal instigation. And going down the welcome-walk where pink wood sorrel grew Long summers when he wandered, prince of all he knew, He smelled no blazoned fragrances from blooms withered and gone But gazed on high-pitched phone wires, stark and taut in dawn. The walk led to a gravel drive with pebbles gleaming bright— Translucent yellow, rust, and pink, gray, black, and cloudy white— And up above them, some ways off, those telephone wires strung One line above another, pole to pole, straight hung. The scene looked like a lined white page or like a music sheet Designed for sounds of words or notes high above the street. The boy scooped up a good handful of many-tinted stones To hit the wires and set off twanging monotones. He threw sidearm and overhead—rocks jagged, flat, and round— Some zinging wires that whined with vibrant cadenced sound Though most stones arced and fell away through silence to the sand Washed from pinewood slopes to build up watermelon land. The boy soon tired of what it took to keep the wires singing And so the lines grew still again although they kept on ringing Inside the mind of one almost ready to comprehend The muse had chosen him that day as hers for her own end. And so in time his lines like wires would thrill with carol, song, Eclogue, georgic, elegy, and anthem set along This wold’s millennium-rhythms, iambic hills one hears Measured out in eons like the music of the spheres. ...