Most people hear "audiophile" and picture a darkened room, enormous speakers and an argument about cables. Dave Bonta's six-line poem takes the word out of that world and drops it in a workshop, where sound is carved, glued and strung rather than streamed. His sound-lover hands an instrument to the person who made it and trusts him completely. The central idea is that making music and making language are neighbouring crafts, and that the poet, like the player, is a customer at the same bench.
The form is plain. There are three unpunctuated couplets, no capital letters apart from "I", and lines of only four to six syllables. With no full stops, the poem has to be read in one breath, and it ends without closing, as if a note were still sounding. The line endings don't rhyme (head/maker, wise/sound, merchant/words), but the sound is thick inside the lines. The long "i" of "viol", "wise" and "high" runs through the poem like a held note. "Pitch merchant" clicks together on its shared "ch". Even the repetition of "viol" in the first two lines, "my viol head" and "my viol maker", sounds like a string plucked twice.
The opening is deliberately slippery. "I give my viol head" can be read as a transaction: the speaker hands over the head of his instrument, the end with the pegs and scroll, for the maker to work on. But it can also be read as a self-portrait. A "viol head" sounds like a "petrolhead" or a "gearhead", a person obsessed. Judging by the phrasing, the poem lets both meanings stand, so the speaker is partly the owner of an instrument and partly the fanatic the title promises.
The second couplet turns to the maker. "his name is wise / who deals in sound" has an old, proverbial ring, like "wise is the man who…" with the word order flipped. It could also be taken literally, as a surname, and the poem doesn't say which. Then there is "sound" itself. It means noise, but it also means reliable and healthy, as in "sound judgement". Putting "wise" beside it hints that someone who trades in sound ought to be sound. The maker deals in both the sensory and the sensible.
The final couplet gives him a third title, and the tone shifts. "Viol maker" is a craftsman, "wise" is a sage, and now "a pitch merchant" is a trader. "Pitch" has several meanings here. It is musical pitch, it is a salesman's pitch, and it is also the name of a sticky, tar-like substance. Each meaning fits a workshop, and the word turns the shop into a market stall. Reverence comes with a wry grin.
The last line, "here for some high words", adds more play. "High" suggests the treble register a viol can reach, and it also suggests lofty, elevated language. In English, though, "high words" is an old idiom for angry, heated talk, a quarrel. Nothing in the poem tells us which sense wins, so the speaker may be shopping for upper notes, for grand speech, or for a fight. Whichever it is, the poem ends on "words", and the subject quietly changes from instrument to language. The speaker came for a viol but is really shopping for what a poet needs, and the maker of sound becomes a stand-in for the maker of poems.
The poem is significant because it does so much in so little space. It gives the stock word "audiophile" a handmade, wooden meaning, and it makes ordinary phrases such as "give head", "deals in" and "high words" do double and triple duty. It also doesn't explain itself, so the reader has to do what the title promises and listen closely. The small scene, a customer in a shop talking to the person who makes sound, becomes a way of saying that poetry is a trade too, with its own tools, its own bargains and its own wise merchants.