A Somewhere Violin

I was reading Hart Crane and came across the phrase, 'a somewhere violin' in a poem called National Winter Garden. Immediately, on these rare occasions, one knows that has to be the next poem.
It has to be about solo violin music, then it is the one thing between us and eternity. It brings to mind not only my CD of Rachel Podger but Nigel Kennedy at last year's Proms, Maxim Vengerov's recent return at the Wigmore Hall and, mostly, for me, Tasmin Little in Portsmouth last summer.
It becomes a secular prayer, a conflation of time and space, light years are a measure of distance, of course.
I'm not convined I will be quite presumptuous enough to send it to Tasmin.
Poems should perhaps ideally be written the other way round.

 

A Somewhere Violin 

for Tasmin Little 

Protect us now from permanent silence

and come with us while we explore the dark,

a talisman lit alone in shadows

between cigars on Leipzig afternoons.  

One last tornado, one last avalanche,

the light years that dragged by in the meantime

between us and the vast, star-strewn midnight

are this seismic, torrential partita.