Dad's Violin (version 2)

The stern brown leather started to peel
from the heavy, wrinkling violin case.
The latches rusted, and sqeaked
at my prying fingers.

Dad seldom brought it out anymore,
and did so only on special occasions:
his friends entreating his pleasure for playing,
my kid brother's birthday bash

or Mom's much-missed anniversary.
Any other day, he'd be away, locked
inside the master's bedroom,
asleep in lazy afternoons.

To this day, a tinny, tiny squeal
escapes the violin when I thumb
my frustrated fingers in attempting to play,
regressing myself to a nine-year-old, frustrated me

(who found it much more pleasureable to watch TV,
play video games, or read books
instead of practicing and inevitably
facing Dad's scorn for my scorn for discipline).

Days like these I'd wake the violin from its green bed
and I'd see them: cracks from when Dad
gashed it on the grouchy ground,
disgruntled at his own father's trite tutelage.

There are bruises in the brown, oft-cheerful face,
scratches at its shoulders, scars where there was tape
to mark the places I also placed my once-darkening digits,
memorizing them with practiced misery I could ill-afford.

He'd play the violin once in a weary blue-moon weekday,
and I'd hear: the low, bassy notes, a husky voice
whispering. Dad would be right by himself, dancing secret steps
I'd never understand nor inherit.

I'd hear, until Dad's song inevitably
reaches its long, continuing, solitary note,
and then a final rest, before the silence
to be played on an unmoving heart-line.