Tag: Violin

First date lines

I can tell you that I play the violin, albeit badly. But everyone plays the violin badly until their tenth year of playing. I can also tell you what the inside of a methadone clinic smells like: mildew and urine and cheap caustic soda. Home brand, no matter how private the clinic. I can tell you that such places are great equalizers, with everyone in the queue hovering at the edges of their skin. That some people will take their ‘done and sell it or chase it with ice or steroids.  That others will swallow their dose and let the chemicals hold them, like a slow-release embrace, and they’ll go to work as accountants, or academics or tradies.

What else do you want to know? I can tell you that each Christmas I consider driving to Flagstaff Hill and free falling from the jagged cliffs. But then I think of my calico cat who licks my nostrils every night and my tuxedo cat who enjoys second and sometimes third dinners.  And with this thought I realise that no one else would love them in the same peculiar way.  Instead, every Christmas I drive northwards past the leafy suburbs of Sydney where the self-declared successful people live. And I keep driving, to friends I would call family if only the latter felt like safety.

Anyway, did I tell you I play the violin badly?

I can tell you that I sound like a funeral dirge in the key of D minor, played in the corner of a small-town pub, sung by a tone-deaf Nick Cave/ Joan Baez cover band.

What they don’t tell you

Prose poetry in three movements

What they don’t tell you (movement one)

…is that you’ll be clutching at the edges of life, ripping nails clean from your nail bed, leaving bloodied fingertips too wet to grasp ledges. What they don’t tell you is that it’s a loss, nobody tells you that you’ll rake the fur lined, dust coated carpets for powdered residue, that you’ll sneak into friends’ bedrooms just to hold their prescription Endone in your hands, just because…

because there is hope in the holding.

What they don’t tell you is that instead of poppy seeds, you’ll be downing opened bottles of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay, three months opened and more vinegar than wine, that you’ll be eating when your body is not hungry, grease drenched burgers and cardboard fries, but that there is more than one type of hunger. And you’ll run by the river, through muddy, waterlogged grass, around and around soccer fields until your knees lock in protest and the lactic acid paralyses your calves.

That when you can no longer run, you will crawl home and lie on your rug weeping, that the weeping will collect in a pool around your foetal form. What they don’t tell you is that sobriety is grief-stricken, a period of mourning.

That gear was a life partner that held you,

and that person is no longer there.

What they don’t tell you (movement two)

….is that your skin will curl and break, that wounds will weep, and an infection will break, that the compulsion to create will seep from your body. Boils will open and pus will leak, and you will write in a way that you have never written,

in between students and clients, on office note pads, with scratchy ballpoint pens, on pizza take away menus and envelopes screaming overdue bills,

you’ll write

in a grasping, clutching way, and you’ll be driven to sound, to rhythm, to the edges of life, that your ears will sharpen to your violin, attune to the hidden notes on that fretless instrument you play. That your ears will recognise that B is shrill, stern like an old school ma’am, that D is resonant but calm, a yogi and

these are moments you don’t crave opiates,

moments of softness or heart, your cat’s paws on your chest for instance, a friend who buys you Thai chilli basil tofu and steamed rice for lunch, and laughter,

yes laughter, untethered.

What they don’t tell you (movement three)

They use the word clean, but that’s a misnomer, as though passing a drug test means your body is free of the impurities and that’s not true,

the body remembers.

cells remember.

And how can they not remember flesh breaking and heart calcifying and a child running to the corners of breathing so nobody can break her further

Flesh and bone hold your own trauma and the cells your parents’ and grandparents’ trauma. And what do you do with this epigenetic fate?

You pick up your violin and play the saddest of scales, D minor, the musical key for dirges and laments until your neighbour bangs on your ceiling and you stop, but the knowledge is there. You’re working out how to live with the library of knowledge trapped in subcutaneous fat, you’re working out how to hold yourself when gear was the only love who knew how to hold you.

Protection song (a poem in progress)

I am still working on this, but wanted to share the first verse.

The violin is what you play 
when you can’t sing.
Red backed fairy wrens 
know their mother’s song
before they hatch 
to protect themselves from
birds of prey. 
The violin is what you play
when your mother didn’t have a song for you,
but you’d like to find your own 
Protection song.

Not our 9th symphony (apartment clang)

For Jaki

Listen neighbour friend,
Not our ninth symphony but a song cycle,
Where the whimper becomes a roar.
You bring the wind and I’ll bring the string. 
Come dance a jig, waltz, Charleston,
move slowly, move quickly, just move.
Play andante, allegro, just play
in time or out
Off-key or not-
don’t stop
don’t stop.

Come neighbour friend,
You bring the wind and I’ll bring the string. 
Rouse the feline chorus with a disquieting whir. 
And we’ll play as we dance over moss coated pavers, 
spring planters and silent doors. 
And if we fall let us rise, 
If we can’t play, let us sing.
If we can’t sing, let us shout.
This is not our 9th symphony so
let our whimper be a roar.

Like that, neighbour friend.
You move the wind while I move the string.
This is not our 9th symphony,
And our whimper is a roar.
Two four, three four
four four-
Keep playing, keep dancing.
Drown their war words with soul song.
Drown their shatter words,
their bludgeon words.
All those weapon words that fracture the air.

For more poems from The Fiddle Series, please see the Poetry tab on the left. https://word-upon-word.com/a-cry-for-help-unsolicited-poetry/

The Devil’s Instrument

Mostly she practices for the park pigeons,
who flock to her side and sit as brooding hens.
Beneath her feet, concrete splattered with avian poop,
Ciggie butts and iridescent phlegm.
But still she practices,
Shoulders ablaze, her right arm a system of uncoiling springs
Her mind also unfurling, idle and fertile for the devil himself.

Her violin vibrates long after she has stopped playing.
Let the rumours begin, of bartered souls
and human gut strung taught as string.
What else could make the peasants dance and bring 
peace among the pigeons?
Paganini’s mother sold his soul for a virtuoso son,
And her own mother traded her for a leafy suburb 
and a Mrs before her name:
In the capitalist wheel we are all bought and sold! 

The trick is style. Personal Branding 2.0!
Suited men and winged apparitions are all the rage,
How can hoofs and horns compete with such 
multi-level marketing?
Being a woman and therefore degenerate,
being a novice fiddler, 
She makes all the deals with all the devils.

Evolution

She sleeps with an imaginary violin

tucked beneath her left chin.

In the morning her neck is redwood and

after the camphor oil rub,

 she is a eucalypt on fire.

Her hands too, are changing,

Left hand cupped, each finger extended from

The palm and not the joint.

Wire printed fingertips calloused flat, feel nothing,

In the quest to hear everything.

And there’s the way she folds into its timbre

Into the vibration where horsehair meets wire

And there’s the way her bones calcify into bow,

Her arm a branch bent slightly to catch the

Light and beat.

And there’s the way she would like to nestle into its hollow

and after a minim, emerge transformed-

beyond the captured staves, beyond the renaissance rules-

to play reels beside the slowing river,

beneath the buttress roots and shedding bark

to beckon life back from forever death.

Let her practice on a promise to the earth:

Maybe, maybe we can change-

Lift a key, raise an octave.

Let us practice at humanity.

Listen, the rhythm will come!

Intonation scratchy then smooth then scratchy

Then smooth until finally

New muscle memory will form.

Practice more.

Practice better.

Practice in the hollows where sound is born.

On fiddle writing

Learning to hold the violin bow

I began writing feverishly at the age of 15 because I couldn’t play an instrument. When I first heard Celtic fiddle music it was as though I heard what it was like to fly-sans jet fuel, and winged metal box soaring at 10 000 feet. I wanted to arrange words that flew, that made me feel as though a simple sentence could defy gravity. Emily Dickinson once stated that the gold standard question she asked about her own writing was “Do these words live?” I suppose that the question that I ask myself is “Do these words fly?” And if they don’t fly do they at least float, or dance a little in a way that could be flying. In a certain slant of light.

Fast forward 20 plus years and I am learning the classical violin. There is nothing like learning an obnoxious instrument during lockdown. The violin isn’t inherently obnoxious, but it is when you don’t stay in the third lane and your bow sounds like nails upon a chalkboard. But hey, my next door neighbour possibly runs a male knock in shop, and I have a tendency to be passive aggressive.

I’m learning the classical techniques because I believe in doing things properly. But I follow a guy called PeakFiddler on You Tube, a self taught Fiddler. The difference between the fiddle and the violin is that the rules go out the window with the fiddle. You can forgo proper posture, bow hold…hell you don’t even need the shoulder rest. As long as you hit the notes, keep the time signature and make sure your violin is in tune, you’re sweet.

I like to think that I’m a fiddle writer. Grammar and syntax in order, I like to play with words so the words become dance and the narrative becomes performance. Really, life is just that, a three to five act play of tragic-comedy. We may as well have a laugh and pretend that we can fly.