Banjo Origins (1): The American Instrument

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 9 of 22 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

One scant & skinny time
alone with the astrolabe,
Columbus had a vision of stomachs
blown up thump-hard
& strung with horsehair,
& when he came to,
his mouth was full of the taste
of bitter almonds. All day
his shadow crept around him
on the deck, seeping into
every godforsaken cranny as
he plotted his next voyage:
ascending the world’s nipple by ship.
Surely the Caribs hadn’t
gotten there yet & spoiled it
with their deplorable dietary preferences.
But he saw again
those stark ribs—
frets on a lute, rungs to the crow’s nest–
& below, that pot
in which by the cheerful sound of it
something was bubbling,
something irreplaceable
was being melted down.

Series Navigation← Banjo vs. GuitarLuck →

About Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with one quadrillion of his closest microbial friends --- a tight-knit, symbiotic community comprising some 500 different species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.
This entry was posted in Books and Music, Poems & poem-like things and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Banjo Origins (1): The American Instrument

  1. dale says:
    January 25, 2010 at 8:35 pm

    Read this aloud to myself, once, twice, three times. Fucking marvelous.

    • Dave says:
      January 26, 2010 at 3:31 pm

      Really? Well, you might be happy to know another “banjo origins” poem is in the offing, even though this one was not one of my favorite poems. Thanks for liking it.

  2. dale says:
    January 26, 2010 at 6:31 pm

    I’m always a sucker for your “new world” turns, you know :-)