SAXOPHONE

Tethered to my French rust tenor, old as music, I sat inside woodshed washed melodies, withdrawal Harlem harmonies, my lips and fingers reverberating Dexter till I played drunk, Trane till I split rage, Sonny till I stood on the bridge and knew pain’s lonely breeze.  I watered that inherited pain in a terrarium garden, whisky heavy, till it sounded almost like jazz belonged to me. 

My fingers learned to race the spines of mountains, my lips learned to dip and heave thick timber trunks, my ears memorized the architecture of Birdland and Watts.  I sang their heroine solos at the tips of suburban cul-de-sacs, threw their tormented arpeggios at the glass doors of closed strip-malls, locked myself inside their craft as if it was my own.

I abandoned it.  Shut the horn away in my closet.  The borrowed pain sat empty in my hands, untrained and awful.  My tongue slurped gin and fluttered nonsense. My fingers ran scales up the spines of women who couldn’t love me. “What are you doing?” they’d ask.  “Practicing,” I’d say. 

Mother’s cancer body ceiling collapsing, boyhood walls melting around me, I was a child shivering naked on a lonely stage. When she died, my father slipped, “your mother’s gone” and I couldn’t find tears, instead, my mouthpiece, and unchained Harlem and Watts and Dex and Trane and Sonny and burst rehearsed pain, shuddering the Rocky Mountains, the levies exploding, blasting dust out the bell.