HYMNS

Ralph came to my house
with the dobro he got the day before
from an eighty-year-old woman
who'd lived all her life in New Hope.

She'd had the dobro since she was twelve.
Ralph said she told him
she'd never played anything but hymns.

She told him how two weeks before
a big plane came down in the road at New Hope.
This was in the news.
One of the engines blew off at tremendous speed.
It didn't hit the room where she sat, watching,
but knocked down a pine tree in her front yard instead.

One time when I was very young and standing in the yard,
an airplane flew over, not high and small,
but low and loud just over the roof of the house.
It wasn't a cropduster. It was an airliner of some kind.

I asked Ralph whether he thought not being killed
by the airplane had anything to do
with the old woman selling the dobro.
He doesn't look for connections like that.
He expects life to be random.
I keep hoping for a plot, in which
an airplane could be a symbol or something.

He traced the silver resonator
and looked at me like he does
when I ask questions.
He didn't touch the strings for a long time.
He'd never played, alone, in front of me.

When he finally started,
the music was so wonderful and so old
you'd have thought the dobro
that belonged to the woman such a long time
was still singing for her.