Before it ever sat on a banjo, the fifth string was out of work and on the road. That is the joke and the charm of Dave Bonta's "Banjo Origins (2): The Fifth String," which tells the instrument's story as a small folk tale. The numbering in the title suggests it belongs to a sequence of such tales, but it stands on its own. A wandering string takes odd jobs, gets lucky, and ends up giving the banjo its character.
The first stanza is a résumé. The string has worked as "guy wire for a weathervane," as "the main spring in the crouch of a cat," and as "a corn broom's binding cord." These jobs have something in common: each is a thin, taut, flexible thing that holds tension. The cat's crouch is the best of them. A coiled body ready to spring is exactly what a plucked string is before the note sounds. The second stanza turns each job into a skill. The wire taught it "to sing the wind's several laments," the cat taught it "to play with its prey," and the broom's cord, which bundles many straws into one, taught it "to teem." That last line is the shortest in the poem, and the verb is unexpected. It makes a single string sound like a swarm, as if one thread could hold a crowd of sounds.
The third stanza moves into comedy. Casting the banjo as a theatre holding "auditions for a new first string" is funny, and "the fifth string got the part" has the ring of a surprise casting. Banjo players will also know why it is a surprise. The fifth string is the odd one out, a short drone string with its tuning peg set into the side of the neck rather than at the end with the others. The poem enjoys this oddity by flipping a familiar idiom. Instead of a square peg in a round hole, a misfit, we get a "square tuning peg" that is "a perfect fit / for that round & bottomless hole." The drifter's awkwardness is exactly what the banjo needed. Whether the hole is the instrument's hollow body or something larger, "bottomless" gives it a mythic depth, as though the banjo were as deep as the wind the string learned to sing with.
The last stanza steps back with a simile: the banjo "began / to resemble itself, / like a forest that fills / the spaces between the trees / with more trees." On the surface this is nonsense, since nothing can resemble itself more than it already does. But the idea works the way a good musical drone does. The fifth string adds no new kind of sound. It adds more of the same, and the instrument becomes denser and more fully itself. A forest is a fitting image because it is made of repeated things, and it echoes that earlier word "teem."
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is free verse in stanzas of five, three, seven and four lines, and its music comes from sound and pacing. The f sounds in "first," "fifth," "fit," "forest" and "fills" tie the casting scene to the closing image. The ampersands in "& unexpectedly" and "round & bottomless" give the page a casual, handwritten look that suits a tale about a drifter. Plain, colloquial phrases like "happened by" and "got the part" keep the tone light while the images underneath grow stranger.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It works as an origin story, a joke about casting, and a small argument about belonging, all at once. The string succeeds because it brings the weathervane's wire, the cat's spring and the broom's cord with it. The poem suggests that an instrument is assembled from the world's loose ends, and that a misfit can be what completes it.