The Sunday Poem: The Frets

a love poem

Towards the soundhole they come closer together—
crunched at the high notes, hash marks
on mahogany. They lay there, unconscious,
limp under fretting fingers; the strings do all the work.
After a few million notes they wear down, melt
into the wood, develop smaller hash marks of their own,
calluses where I press their spines.

I can just see them now, at night, getting up off the guitar,
gathering in conclaves, swearing rebel oaths
of secrecy, vowing to vanish one day and leave me
without tiny little countries of sound to crush
(don’t mean to hurt) under my fingertips. Such an awful life—
metal that could have been a car, a plough, a wedding ring,
serving as boundary between two invisible places.

Even for Utopia, I don’t want them to leave,
the notes mixing into one chord that sounds, well,
like mud. Eventually the guitar might be mistaken
for a cello or something, which grew up fretless.
I’d never know exactly where things belonged,
precisely what pitch to vibrate at, when to brush,
when to bend, or how far to move fingers
along the neck, the spine, how hard to press,
when there came the desire to make music.