Violin Maker’s Wood

Thirty years back: Vermont, sugar season.

He walks the maple groves,
listening for the one that sings off-key,
the one whose grain spirals like a question mark.

Most trees hum contentment, their futures clear:
syrup, lumber, flame.

But sometimes one calls different—
this lightning-struck maple still standing,
its scar a dark river of pitch
that learned to conduct new frequencies.

Carnegie Hall, third row center.

The Chaconne begins.

He’s thirty years back in a Vermont sugar bush,
late March, sap running.

That maple on the north slope,
the one struck years before—
there, in the violin’s lower bout,
the D string’s dark honey.

He knows this tree,
remembers the crow’s nest in its crown,
how it leaned into morning like a question.

The violinist doesn’t know she’s playing weather,
playing sap-rise and storm-scar,
playing the precise angle of a hillside in spring.

But he hears it:
the wood remembering its first life,
each note carrying the grove above the stone wall,
that particular silence before snow.

Twenty years between felling and first note—
the wood drying in his rafters,
shedding moisture like memory
until only essence remains.

He’d check it yearly, tap and listen,
waiting for the day it stopped mourning its roots
and began dreaming of strings.

Then the slow carving,
following grain like reading braille,
the wood teaching him where thin, where thick,
where the lightning left its perfect flaw
that would become the voice’s dark center.

Now the Chaconne builds toward its architectural grief,
and the violinist sways,
feeling something she can’t name—
not just Bach’s sorrow but an older ache,
the tree’s memoir in her hands.

In the pause before the final movement,
she glances at the maple
as if seeing it for the first time,
this thing that remembers being sky.

The final note releases into the hall’s hushed space,
and for a moment he sees it all:
the maple’s ghost standing stage left,
crown brushing the gold ceiling,
roots reaching through three floors of seated listeners,
the tree finally hearing what it became.

The violinist lowers her bow.

Outside, March wind through city maples,
asking, asking, dark-centered.