Poems May 2005
Fiddle-faddle
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle
—Marianne Moore, “Poetry”
Well, all that fiddle
perhaps. But not this
sublime faddle, far
more important
than whatever “this
fiddle” might have been
(although granted not
the resonant
machine of spruce and
maple that we need
to hear certain
kinds of truth with).
Fiddle can sound as
if it had a
silly middle and
were thereby of use
for crumpling knowledge,
work delighted in,
devout attention,
into a ball
and tossing it
away in some slight
annoyance (but not
to every one’s) and
(worse!) averting one’s
gaze from what follows
it so doggedly:
fiddle’s dark shadow,
faddle—not a past
tense of the verb we
have been fiddling with
but rather a
residue of all
that business of strings—
strings bowed and tickled
and pinched and plucked—
all that fiddling
to which Nero’s Rome
burned, they said, and to
which the high walls of
Amphion’s Troy rose
as its stones took wing,
settling down into
where they belonged—
the faddle of life’s
rhythms of decay
and reconstruction,
once the fiddle’s
flying and sighing
intonations have
shaped all that faddle
in its final form.
Well, then the death of
all that importance
incident to
the fiddler’s own death
—the body, the mind
with their pains and woes
their cares and delights
their assessments
of what matters most
all fled—the faddle
will settle down
in its newly found
place in existence,
played and playing, sung
and singing, ever
shaping anew
the sounds of what is
seen, the lights and shades
of what is heard, and
thereby giving
some previously
inconceivable
new meaning to
importance itself.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 Number 9, on page 34
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