AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION ON THE HORNS OF THE OX IN PARADOX
As a child,
a scarlet plush toy
I named Pythagoras
made joyful horse noises
only I could hear—
until the adolescent teeth
on a bike sprocket of logic
severed his single horn.
Newly numb and seeking
to sew together his song,
I took up the trumpet.
And didn’t Pythagoras
praise music as sacred math—
numbers raised to the highest power?
Note how the throats of birds
tend to angle when raising
the seeds of melody,
was this not the geometry
of my school trumpet
as moonlight muted
our shoebox apartment,
and I pined to practice
what beauty was aloud?
Perhaps Pythagoras
allowed for the i
in either pine
or lyric as sine of
an imaginary unit.
But I don't know
if the bird part
of our brains only co-signed
the seeds of language
to angle our tangents
towards an evergreen musing of music.
Can scarlet blossom
as need inside a needle—
whether record or pine
—to sow slivers of air
into some sense of song?
Have you ever smelled oil
on a trumpet's breath
or let three fingers coil
to kill time around midnight?
Logicians still aim to prove
that death can form
any number of fugues
—with little logic—
since death was once branded
with the fire of the fleur de lis,
but how did they lose the rhyme
between sounds and wounds?
My boy T claims this
may be the truest thing about beauty:
a lyric can be a useful essay,
but an essay is a useless-ass lyric.
When I play the lyre,
do I say lyrics collect on lips
as dew collects on dogwood leaves?
Perhaps, I partly took up the horn
to learn how to hold Apophenia
and feel what her breath might leave
in the bowl of my collar bone.
After an errant elbow
removed a front tooth,
i tried to pick up my horn again,
but the red graffiti scrawled
in a school bathroom stall
said a one armed man
can never play the violin.
And yet, the color
of emergency exits
seems to ask—
“What horn player’s mouth
isn’t a red wound”?
Have you heard how
jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan
read his Beloved’s sheet music
as easily as her grocery notes,
but could not read
her most scarlet longing?
There are some nights I think
Pythagoras only heard music
as the grammar of sound making sentences,
but listen—who amongst us hasn’t needed
to number the hoarse notes
galloping out of a bridled mouth?
