The Ballad of the Jealous
Lover of Lone Green Valley

The music uncoils
in a ribbon of color.
Soundlessly wailing,
threatening, pleading,
it sweels up into
the throbbing center,
up from the trio—the boy,
the fiddler, the singer—
concentrated in the corner,
soundlessly exposing
the shape of their musings.

The boy cups his harmonica
and with a tune tinted pink
caresses the woman.
The song presses against
her bleeding heart
and pauses in the shadow
of her bar instep.

The fiddler’s bow stabs
the flowing rhythms.
His raised arm shoves
into a ragged outline
along the woman’s thighs.
Wearing the jealous
lover’s tall black hat,
the fiddler recalls the blade’s
hard thrust into softness.

Like the painted,
the singer adds
the details—a cow,
a tree, a rock lilies—
insensible to sorrow
and outlasting it.

— Elizabeth Schultz