When you played the records with needles

                                   by W. S. Merwin

Antique Sound

There was an age when you played the records

with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt

and damaged the grooves or with more expensive

stylus tips said to be tungsten or diamond

which wore down the records and the music receded

but a friend and I had it on persuasive authority

that the best thing was a dry thorn of the right kind

and I knew where to find one of those off to the left

of the Kingston Pike in the shallow swale

that once had been forest and had grown back

into a scrubby wilderness alive with

an earthly choir of crickets blackbirds finches

crows jays the breathing of voles raccoons

rabbits foxes the breeze in the thickets

the thorn bushes humming a high polyphony

all long gone since to improvement but while

that fine dissonance was in tune we rode out

on bicycles to break off dry thorn branches

picking the thorns and we took back the harvest

and listened to Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky

Quartets echoed from the end of a thorn.