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Your Violin
When you look at me your ancestors fall out your eyes–
Romania, the Camps, Zion and Lady Liberty.
You are traveling still, I may not be home.
You look at me when you’ve found a crack in
your grandmother’s violin. Your swaying and fingering
stops in the stream as your son bows still.
Your china shop bull is prancing in my living room,
and my grandmother’s candy dish clanks claps in time
or on the edge of it. You would build a village with
words or playing cards or particles, electrons, if you
could just learn the trick of pulling them through
the veil. The veil to that dimension, the veil between
the world of the living and the world of the dead.
The ancestors, reduced to Platonic forms in your head,
to the thoughts of a violin bow as she sings old notes,
and remembers leaving home.
When you pull at me your ancestors fall out your eyes
and you become all ages of a human man, out of order as
your face squints affection and worry. “Impish,” that’s the
word you prefer for the boy who makes you say the
wrong thing. And a moment later you’re a lover at my
neck or the traveler at mid-life, the highway a neck of a
violin. Thoughts veil your face and your fingers twist your
beard. I expect a Torah lesson but then you return to me
and the boy grins, hands full of liberty and my locks.
You hide in science as if God has hidden your homeland in
space time and we are to live in the house that experimentation
built. I just want to collect your DNA. For further study.
I’m a witch. I know the power of words better than a physicist.
But I’m a poet. I know words are sirens and a ship on the rocks
is no homeland. But our eyes locked, telling ages and the
myths we make to hold hurts, our eyes locked, our bellies
locked, dimensions, homelands, make me your violin.
–WT
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