Why Poetry Cannot Be Skimmed

In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before class The barn was in the Netherlands, in a field where fierce night wind caught the straw as if to fuse the winter stars to their coldness. A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing his animals would be agitated, walked to the barn and by lantern brushed the tails of his horses. In calming them he gathered many long, gleaming strands of their nut-brown hair. Given over to what he heard in the swishing of their tails— the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow, persistence turned to rhythmic movement— he hoped that if he listened long enough the layered sound would become a salve. He rolled the strands together, laid out along the windowsills of the barn. Then, once dry enough in spring, he rolled them in paraffin wax to preserve the sound and left them to absorb all the varied rays of sun, the spills of rain, and then snow flying fast across the latched windows and the slats, the rhythm of other breathing, animals plodding by the barn walls. The wax melted as the years progressed and other horses resided in the stalls, and their tail strands were added to the aging threads.  From that encased sound deepening over years, a rope, pulled strong and taut, would resonate. Then another generation worked the land and waxed the horse-tail cord again, and in turn when it caught that century’s light, was spun into amber. Woven into the cells of hair: the tones of canal and field, pasture, furrows of plough, leaf and shadow, straw and stone, the human calling, the animal uttering. And when melted again, incrementally strands from other horses living there were added until there were enough layers of sound, set with the nourishment of grass and salt, to be given away and the space the hair had occupied would be returned to emptiness. The horse-hair cord was brought by a farmer to a luthier’s shop along a canal, and it was a perfect fit, she said, for a violin bow she had carved a few months earlier, waiting, and for the bow-less violin someone had just given her.  She knew rosin carrying a current through pastures, filled thirst, and the grief of night wind and scavenged apples made the gathered pieces a whole. And now they are together in your hands this moment to make unrehearsed, immediate, after all those animals’ years, when you bring the instrument to your chin, when you raise the hair-strung bow, again their elemental sounding, and then their measured note, their first.