Old Strings

The guitar I took from Grandpa’s closet
is nearly 80 years old. The strings
can’t be much newer; I never saw
or heard him play, what with the
arthritis and all.

Guitars are not like violins:
they peak and fail after a time.
There’s no such thing
as a three hundred year old
perfect player; their voices fall
into wisps of their former roar.

Gramps was like that too, or so I’m told;
numbers runner, bookie, bootlegger
in the secret room downstairs. We found
a small revolver flocked green with corrosion
in a grape crate after he was gone, pulled
strips of paper with forgotten debts
from crannies in the stone walls. Hard to imagine
what he must have been like, since all I knew of him
was the wheelchair, the voice so crusted with emphysema
he was barely intelligible, the branch-crooked fingers
and the bottle of Old Grandad next to his bed.

I check out the instrument, get it close to tune,
draw a G-chord from the fragile box. Surprise myself
when the tears come to my eyes. Surprise myself
when I try to recall the melody to “Stagger Lee”
and try to play it though I knew the strings might snap
and cut me if they fly unbridled through the air
into the wet skin of my cheek. Surprise myself
when I say to myself, “I don’t care,” and
keep on puzzling out that old outlaw song.