Mandolin

Dog days, flat heat, the sky tight

as a Holiness tambourine. I am walking the road

gouged out to make way for Saddle Ridge Manor

and mourning the slaughter of timber,

but someone down the bulldozed slope

is striking true notes like fireflies in the August air.

For troubadours of the courtly age

this sound was a lute, a pear-shaped, four-stringed gourd

to set the mood for chivalry and wit,

but it picked up a set of shadow strings

and outlived vaudeville irony,

the sweet tremolo of parlor play

and ragtime just jaunty enough for cakewalks,

till what I hear is the amplified flatback

Orville Gibson gave it, an ebony bridge

with bronze strings too taunt to jump the nut,

and this musician playing somewhere, I’m guessing,

down by Buckle Creek, near the narrows

where water rills quick and clear,

is tuning to the seven-year insects

resuming their chivaree in the evergreens,

not quite the holy call and response,

but something secular and just as desperate.

It’s a miniature instrument for delicate fingers

strong enough to shiver a fret,

and in this heat I drink it in like water

from a mint spring as I remember

how young Ricky Skaggs, already

a picking prodigy and keen to blend gospel

with his old-time riffs, asked Bill Monroe

the secret to becoming a great player

of the bluegrass mandolin,

and the master looked hard into the sky’s mystery

and back at the plectrum of tortoiseshell

shaped like a deer tick pinched in his fingers

before he answered the boy:

“Son,” he said, “you got to whip it like a mule.”

And that is the fiery melody I hear

over the cicadas’ amber serenade

of breakdown, blues licks and frantic reel.

Even on this worksite the county calls

progress, I bow to the enduring thirst for melody

and thank a lonesome picker, as the full moon

round as a cat-skin banjo sails

over the remnant saw-toothed pines.

For hopeful good measure and the ghost of harmony,

I cut a shuffle step, heel kick and twirl

in the rusted dust on the margin

of this sleeping, mongrel world.

R. T. Smith

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