Wine, song, poetry and...gee-tar.

April is National Poetry Month. It’s also International Guitar Month--no kidding. And since the Nickorettes (an acoustic trio my two friends and I are putting together) are playing for our friend’s daughter’s wedding today, and since I’ve been scheming a summer poetry project, my head is a’whirl with verse & song. So I offer up this little poem. It’s the result of two things that had been floating around in my head back then: (1) Christopher Dewdney’s amazing list poem, “Grid Erectile” (see him read it in an excerpt from the incredible 1983 beat-poets video, Poetry in Motion, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN3AaYp_kyY); (2) a concert I’d been to, where the then 20-something Kaki King (before this bit on Letterman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shYdqbJgQdc&feature=related) did something only one or two people in my entire life have been able to do: left me speechless. So the poem is for Dewdney, who gave me reasons without argument, and for King, who stunned me into silence…

PRAYER TO A YOUNG GIRL PLAYING GUITAR

           

            The world has become
                  a spectacle of absence,
                  a radiant inventory.

                                    Christopher Dewdney

Because your pinafore is an alder guitar body shaped like a woman

Because your ringlets are shining rows of phosphor bronze

Because your hands are pale long-legged spiders dancing

Because your wrist bends back like the curl of a garden snail

Because your voice is small and high like a chipping sparrow

Because you call up Earth’s low hum and it echoes in my ribs

Because you can disappear at will in a fog of sound or silence

Because you weave blue & silver chords into sheer electric fabric

Because your vibrato is a flame that trips nerves along my spine

Because you find a labyrinth of bright rooms in a glass bottleneck

Because you trick harmonics and women’s fists unfurl, breath slows

Because old men cry and children stop fidgeting

Because ash settles lightly in the hearts of jealous men

Because these notes are elemental, a baptism

Because you are hollow, a conduit radiating multitonal effusion

Because when you stop there is only absence

Because 5000 people are fed, soothed, rocked to sleep

Because this is the sound a weeping fig must make

Because there was stillness and expectation and now this

Because somewhere in the desert tremors have begun underground

Because water bubbles up from hairline cracks in baked clay

Because yucca flowers open to nocturnal white moths

Because I can only breathe, swallow, blink, wait