Khary Jackson is a performance poet and playwright. A Detroit native, he has competed nationally for three years, making individual finals each year, as well as winning the 2009 National Poetry Slam with the St Paul team. But few of us really care about that. He's a little weird, but rest assured, there's a method to the way he stares into your house.

From Antonio

(May 20, 2010. Issue 17. Letter Poetry Contest 3rd Place Winner!)

Note: Antonio Stradivari is widely considered the greatest violin maker that has ever lived. He spent the last 70 years of his life creating over 1,100 instruments. His first wife, Francesca, died in 1698.

When they speak of me, and my violins,
I rarely listen. They've yet to understand,
to learn the language of these hands.
Francesca.
I knew you best in the woods,
where the spruce and maple waited,
dense and humming. God did not grant me a voice
to bend the heart, but rather offered the tools to build my own:
maple and spruce, a carpenter's hands and lute player's ear,
strings. Time. 30 years of marriage taught my hands to mold
the wood into outlines of you. My ears learned to hear underwater.
My violins were deliberately light, hardly a presence in the hand;
I spent my life creating a hundred ways to render you weightless.
Every instrument I carved, shaped and varnished,
inlaid and measured, every hour of the 200 I spent on
every violin and viola and violoncello,
each held a four count measure of what I did not know to say;
I hoped my callouses would translate, satisfy.
Did you notice the glint in my gaze when we attended a concert
featuring my violins? Could you hear me crackling from the bow,
stirring in the belly, shimmering in the forest's voice?
When they speak of me now, their throats gurgle awe
at the work of my apparent “golden period”, beginning in 1698.
Francesca, did they know that this is when you died? With your legs
and laughter taken from me, I had little else to with my hands.
The following year I married another, but I prayed she would
understand: a violin must be played,
continuously, for fifty years before its full potential is revealed,
and Francesca, dear wife, I only had you for thirty. She was too kind to object,
too forgiving not to smile when I named our daughter Francesca.
I'll always love her for raising your children along with hers,
for not withholding affection even when she caught your scent
in my carpenter's dust.
If the Lord Christ had lived longer, his woodworking skill
could have been molded into music. He could have devised a blueprint
for a violin whose sound could resurrect, unearth your voice
from the belly. But to be honest, Francesca, I am still but molded dust;
to physically feel your risen voice could cause me to dissolve,
disintegrate into the workshop floor.
You should have lived to be my widow. When my breath failed me,
when my joy could only sing through a voice I never had,
you would have smelt it, in the varnish, felt it tighten in tune.
While you attended a concert with only the haunting of me,
weightless, I'd have joyfully unfolded, dissolved into you.