Steve Scafidi

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.

Steve Scafidi
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).

Poem, copyright © 2001 by Steve Scafidi
Appearing on From the Fishouse with permission
Audio file, copyright © 2005, From the Fishouse

Posted on February 22, 2005 9:18 PM