After he’d strung the turtle shell with catgut,
the ends of his numb fingers (which he’d thought
he knew how to bring together and tell apart)
had trouble deciding which of the strings to pluck
and which to press down on. But because
he’d been swearing with it, his ordinarily
so-so baritone voice had soured, had gone
to hell and back and kept refusing to meet
or match the strains he could still hear in his head.

He sat down on a rock and tried his damnedest
to think about something else. He thought of the woods.
He thought of weather. He thought of picking daisies.
He thought of selling his lute and leaving home
and going to sea and forgetting about all this
music business, all this mechanical strumming
sharp and flat and this memorizing
and rearranging the picking at dull tunes.

Meanwhile, behind his back, the trees bowed down.
snow melted on the mountains. Wildflowers flourished
in a constant springtime, and the noisy ocean
lowered the crests of its waves and paused to listen.