Of Gut & Gold

My harp is weary heavy

& I can hardly move

it on my own, even now

I’m grown & gone

far from what my father calls

his Canaan. He strums

what strings he can from time

to time, sounds out “Joy

of Man’s Desiring” despite

the fact six strings have

snapped & middle C has

fallen to B. It happened before

I knew it, this learning

to play an hour’s worth

of minuets, what made him

say, “You’re the show

horse & I’m just the work one.”

He traded a stand of trees

for what he knew I’d teach

myself. It’s easy to replay

the scene in which I play

the harp he says I’ll own

someday, my sister’s bow see-

sawing over her violin,

our mother on the upright,

& him so near the fire

he’d built, his fingers

laced, eyes closed tight, torso

rocking like the wand

of a metronome. Maybe

what I wanted was to teach

him a note could still

be new, be worth

a forest trucked to Boise—

but I’ve never won

that argument with God

& it took ten years to know

just what he’d done. None

but my harp teacher

could tell you now the tale

wherein a girl is given

a harp with forty strings of gut

& one of gold. Her father in

the story’s always dying

of some mythic sickness

you can only deem a curse, hands

wilting on dwindled wrists, teeth

crumbling from gums

like bits of gypsum. Each time

she made that gold string sing,

her father’s youth would move

a little closer. Even the wrecked

tunnel of his throat revived

its ballads & his hands

unfurled like lilies dropped

in tea. In the end, she traded one

wellness for another,

grew ancient as her father

grew new. I imagined he lacked

a music of his own, thought

he couldn’t read

the language Mozart spoke,

as if that daughter could have

said a thing to heaven & been heard

just because she’d taken up

her psalmodies so young. I didn’t

yet know he had a secret

music, my father, strange

tongue planted

where I couldn’t go. I heard him speak it

first to the man who helped him

cut down trees. Ayúdeme,

he called, as if I’d never learn

the song of something falling into use.