I'll be spending this romantically sunny morning scrubbing the bathroom and practicing fiddle licks for an afternoon rehearsal. I feel slightly edgy about the rehearsal as it's the first time in several years that I've sat in with a group of serious working musicians. Mostly I tend to play with kids or informally with my friend Dave, when I play at all. I can go for months without taking the violin out of its case. But the muscle memory comes back. I can't do all the fancy audition-on-Boston's-Symphony-Hall stage stuff I used to do as kid, but you know? . . . I don't miss that high-wire act in the least. I could care less, really.

Here are two violin poems. You can see that the instrument and I have not had an easy relationship.

Violin Lesson

Dawn Potter

When you are eighteen,

Mr. Kowalski straddles the piano bench

you will marry my son

in this shrouded house under rain.

and we will drink cognac together

Cars hiss by on the street.

and you will win the competitions,

I did not practice the Sevcik, Hrimaly, or Dont,

so you must forget this laziness.

but fingered silent thirds like nightmares.

Your work is terrible.

The violins on the piano tremble. The room

You shame yourself.

smells of sad people, counting the minutes till freedom,

How can we continue

wasting our talent on sleep and tears.

if you do not love your work?

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]

Violin Recital

Dawn Potter

Humming box of echoes, satin

frame twitching under the child's grasp

like a docile rabbit,

quivering, alive; taut

silver purling call-and-response,

torqued gut and ebony potent

as storm, more

secret than air,

primed innocence, parting

naked lips for the coloratura

oath dragged forth

bow and scrape, a terrible

roar toward glory--

reckless, infant--weltering under a high-

wire apogee, gypsy fingers

crowding the steep,

hunger quaking, prowling through floorboards,

knees, through nervous hips,

hands slick with sweat, pricked ear

canny as a bitten fox.

[from How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]