The Fiddler

 I had this friend who was a world-renowned fiddler. She had toured with Bob Dylan and the Old Crow Medicine Show. We both attended this small, traditional Catholic college, and she would play in the classroom buildings after dinner. I never passed up the opportunity to make sure that I was studying nearby. I wrote this poem nearly a dcade after the last time I had seen her.

I had a dream

   about you

   last night

you were the fiddler in a fantasy wedding held in the back of a K.Mart

   by the baby supplies and discounted clearance junk.

it was an event planned by nerds

   (the bride wore elf ears

   the pimply and nervous groom wore a silver cape

      of his own design)

and you were the fiddler

   waiting in the wings

Your elder sister

   who I've seen once and then only briefly in a photograph

   on the mantel of your childhood home

      in Ohio)

was next to you.

she was giving you exasperated commands

   link a domineering stage mother

   whose imposible expectiations reflect

      her own past missteps

   you looked at her in confusion

   she looked back in frustration

on your cue, you nodded and stood.

your sister rolled her eyes and sighed as you walked on stage(

   You closed your eyes, that contented half-smile returned to your face

   the one you get when you don your fiddle

   (given to you by Doc Watson and over 300 years old

and when you played the entire wedding party-

   your sister, too 

exploded into an intricate and intense ballet

I don't hear sounds in my dreams, but I remember your fiddling perfectly

   in college, you would play in 

      what you thought

   was an empty lecture hall

   but I was there

      I heard

   it broke through the intellectual torture I so joyously put myself through

   poring over words by

      Aristotle

      Augustine

      Euclid (here's looking at you, kid)

The first fight that didn't involve drunken emotion was with my boyfriend,

   a former monk who had left the monastery to go back to school

      He told me he thought that the Virgin Mary's best feature

   was her docility

I had laughed at him

      cows are docile

      humans are not

      How could a queen be docile?

I who thought rebellious shouting was the opposite of docility - would not see his reasoning

   (truth be told, I couldn't see it until he dumped me and married his own docile woman several years later)

   "what I mean is someone like her'

       pointing out the classroom door to the fiddler on the stairs

who unknowingly provided the soft soundtrack to our gentle and forbidden embraces.

I wanted to disagree and

valiantly defend your honor as a Woman of God

Who took no shit.

but

      not wanting to open myself up to the scandal that such places look out for when one woman loves another

   I remained silent

   it wasn't docility

   There were thoughts behind those still green eyes that he would never know

   the same thoughts, I hoped, that floated behind your chestnut ones

   we were not docile

     

   We were broken, maybe.

   broken by men who thought they'd like us better broken

   but as women so often do

      as Mary so often did

   we bore those heavy things in our hearts

   and just like that Grand Mother, you found a way to fill in the cracks of your broken heart

      with the golden and living sounds from a 300-year-old

     fiddle