The Blues

What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinet

and boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?

I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelve

you think the heart and memory are different.

"'It's a poor sort of memory that only works

backwards,' the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland.

Although I knew the way music can fill a room,

even with loneliness, which is of course a kind

of company. I could swelter through an August

afternoon — torpor rising from the river — and listen

to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations

on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room

with me the force and weight of what I couldn't

say. What's an emotion anyhow?

Lassitude and sweat lay all about me

like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,

but I was quick and furtive as a fox

who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism

to burn off as ordinary business.

I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence

of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless

tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few

bars — they were enough — of music. Looking back,

it almost seems as though I could remember —

but this can't be; how could I bear it? —

the future toward which I'd clatter

with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,

a brave man and a coward both,

to break and break my metronomic heart

and just enough to learn to love the blues.

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