Outlaw Style: Poems

Gypsy Fiddle

Gypsy Fiddle How it came to my wife’s grandmother I can’t guess, but the violin locked in our hall closet is a spell hewn in evergreen and ebony, Alpine maple, an hourglass sawed, whittled, and assembled in some lamp-lit forest camp with mother-of-pearl chips inlaid to shape a wildflower. The rough-cut f-holes curve like serpents on the belly, while nicks and scars in the varnish almost tell the secret history of Cain’s progeny, the lost tribe vagrant on a moonlit mountain road. The music knew how to say they suffered. Spun sheep gut anointed with oil of the olive draws tight and ready for the arpeggios of an open fire, the cart wheel, the cards, and evil eye. Because they were shunned, I’m reluctant to touch it, to let my fingerprints mar its sheen, but the color’s irresistible, all amber lac and madder, first light 101 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 101 of a haunted dawn. It can chuckle like a hen, mimic rain or lure the train sound from a distant ravine. Owl screech in the aftermath of thievery is its specialty, but the broken heart is always underscoring the chord structure. It can freshet, shirr, and flurry, pattern like a spider and conjure a silk shawl, black with red tassels, or a knife under the jerkin, and I’m actually happy, or nearly, that my wife has little time to work its magic, to grip its edge between chin and shoulder and show her virtuosity. Such magic is equally curse and cure, the whisper legends tell us must be the Devil’s lure: piercing pitch, crescendo, the slip from gigue to minuet, the song of stars dying in the sky. What it says is how to survive misery, the wake after cruel death, the promise in passion’s amulets. It’s dangerous for anyone to listen to such a device rent, shaved, riven, and joined again by sleight-of-hand, the art of hiding mystery, 102 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 102 the kind of man who could make a tree speak of everything from joy to grief the way the Sabine goddess Vitula taught the ancients to mesmerize any villager: use a fiddle whose supple bow is strung with horse hair and kin to a whip. Sometimes, passing by the closet door, I fancy I can hear scraps of cant, caravan springs, a jangle that is not hangers colliding, a rustle something other than our winter clothes feeling wanderlust. That’s when I ask my wife to see to her instrument’s security, before my feet answer with a manic dancing that is melancholy and frenzy, for not even the hardshell case and a pair of chrome locks snapped with the blessing of a priest in good standing can arrest such highstrung sylvan witchery, the vernacular voltage that will never leave a dazed man alone. 103 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 103 ...