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A Boy's Name and Fiddle

by Cathryn Shea



A Boy's Name

You could make your son a criminal
just by naming him Carl, seemed like the gospel
truth when I was too small to know

and heard talking every day for a long time
about a man on death row, my mother saying
all forms of Carl are bad.

When my son was born, I waited three days before calling him
the name I’d looked up, having checked history and roots
and Biblical references: Brian, for strong.

“That’s perfect,” a nurse said, growing impatient
but doing a good job hiding her eagerness
to get on with it, raising

her brow ever so slightly while overheard saying,
“As if a name could make or break a child’s
destiny.”
​
“Why’d you name him that for?”
(My mother-in-law when we tell her.)
“That’s Irish. He’ll grow up to be a bum.”


​Fiddle

The closet closed for good behind the walls
of our sold house. We cradled the black case,
leather handle bone dry.

The violin inside, crushed against thick green nap,
had traveled through deluge and drought
from Mountain to Pacific time
when my father moved west.

After a few whiskeys, he would pull the case
from behind the vacuum cleaner, play Brahms,
and recount the flash flood and mud
in Colorado Springs that smashed his family’s home,
spared this instrument like a sign from God.

He’d tell how my grandfather slapped him
if he called it a fiddle, made him play Classical
and nothing else, made him turn down
the full music scholarship at State--

He joined the Coast Guard to escape,
even though he’d never seen a coast,
hated water, couldn’t swim
to save himself from drowning.

He found our mother near the seashore
and they produced five girls who would beg him
to bring out the old case and recite again
how he could have played in a symphony.

I ran off with a cellist and snuck the violin with me,
had the sound post fixed in Salt Lake City--
thought I would learn to play by the Yamaha method.
I got as far as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
​​

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​

Cathryn Shea’s latest chapbook is “It’s Raining Lullabies” (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her poetry was nominated for Best of the Net 2017 and appears in Tar River Poetry, Permafrost, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter.
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Photo used under Creative Commons from dejankrsmanovic