Stradivarius

Stradivarius

Sometime soon I will tune my ear to calibrate the difference between one of the seven hundred or so Stradivariuses that remain on this earth & a fifty-dollar fiddle. Then I will hear your sixteenth notes thinning through the wall beneath your careful face. Chant to me the plainsong of your mourning & I will join down there where I know I will discover some new tint in my voice & you in mine. We will drink from our shared wound, suffer in a wheat field's sway, swim night's long moon. Then we will stow this hurt beneath grief's bed & open a lighter door. There are fifty-six Guam Kingfishers (Halcyon Cinnamomina) left in the world. If we saw one some evening near the waves that shift around the Santa Monica pier. If we saw this scarcer-than-a-Strad animal atop a post, folding his rare wings against his rusty chest, I would not take his photo. I would wait for his ascent. For him to bear us with him.