Why Poetry Cannot Be Skimmed

The barn was in the Netherlands,

in a field where fierce night wind

caught the straw as if to fuse

the winter stars to their coldness.

A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing

his animals would be agitated,

walked to the barn and by lantern

brushed the tails of his horses.

In calming them he gathered

many long, gleaming strands

of their nut-brown hair. Given over

to what he heard in the swishing of their tails—

the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow,

persistence turned to rhythmic movement—

he hoped that if he listened long enough

the layered sound would become a salve.

He rolled the strands together, laid out

along the windowsills of the barn.

Then, once dry enough in spring,

he rolled them in paraffin wax

to preserve the sound

and left them to absorb

all the varied rays of sun, the spills

of rain, and then snow flying fast

across the latched windows and the slats,

the rhythm of other breathing,

animals plodding by the barn walls.

The wax melted as the years progressed

and other horses resided in the stalls,

and their tail strands were added

to the aging threads.  From that encased sound

deepening over years, a rope,

pulled strong and taut, would resonate.

Then another generation worked the land

and waxed the horse-tail cord again,

and in turn when it caught

that century’s light, was spun

into amber. Woven into the cells of hair:

the tones of canal and field,

pasture, furrows of plough,

leaf and shadow, straw and stone,

the human calling, the animal uttering.

And when melted again, incrementally

strands from other horses living there

were added until there were enough

layers of sound, set with the nourishment

of grass and salt, to be given away

and the space the hair had occupied

would be returned to emptiness.

The horse-hair cord was brought

by a farmer to a luthier’s shop

along a canal, and it was a perfect fit,

she said, for a violin bow

she had carved a few months earlier,

waiting, and for the bow-less violin

someone had just given her.  She knew

rosin carrying a current through

pastures, filled thirst, and the grief

of night wind and scavenged apples

made the gathered pieces a whole.

And now they are together in your hands

this moment to make

unrehearsed, immediate,

after all those animals’ years,

when you bring the instrument to your chin,

when you raise the hair-strung bow,

again their elemental sounding,

and then their measured note, their first.