For the Eighth Annual Celebration of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, Purcellville, Virginia, November 1999

In the golden spruce front of a violin,
            there in the alternating lines of dark and light
                       like sometimes the rain or
            rays of the sun fall down, you can see
as you can hear all you ever knew once shimmer

and disappear as the violinist plays and what
            he plays is all you know and all you have
                       for the long little while
            he plays and he plays so magnificently
the men and women in the crowd beside you

disappear with you by astonishingly sweet degrees
            and the years pass and your best suit crumbles,
                       your teeth plink to the floor
            as timber by timber the roof caves in,
snow blows through and centuries later wolf packs roam

the wreckage of folding chairs and carry your white bones
            to the new hills of ice growing outside
                       what was once Purcellville
            Virginia and when I think of music
so great no passage of time could ever kill it

I think of some future day far away I hope
            when a mouse pulls some brown grass through the hole
                       it gnawed in the very
            last violin lying somewhere half smashed
in the charred ruins of the shiny ancient cities of

Cleveland or Sacramento and when I think of
            that future day far away I hope
                       I think of the golden
            spruce face of a violin being
played well right now somewhere on the planet

maybe on a mountain in Colorado or a concert hall
            in Havana or along the coast of Nigeria
                       in a fishing boat
            or here where I listen now for the cello
joining in and the flute joining in with the violin.

“For the Eighth Annual Celebration of St. Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music, Purcellville, Virginia, November 1999” is reprinted from Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (LSU, 2001).