AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION WITH THE HORNS OF THE OX IN PARADOX
As a child,
a scarlet plush toy
I named Pythagoras
made joyful horse noises
which only I could hear—
until the adolescent teeth
on a bike sprocket of logic
severed his single horn.
So 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
in the sharpness
of their beaks—
was this not the geometry
of my school trumpet
as moonlight muted
our shoebox apartment,
and I pined to practice
what beauty was aloud?
I want to believe 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 music.
Can’t scarlet blossom
as the 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 round midnight?
Logicians once aimed to prove
that death could form
any number of fugues
—with little logic—
since death was then branded
with the fire of the fleur de lis,
but is that how they lost the rhyme
between wounds and sounds?
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 play lyrics collecting on lips
as dew collects on dogwood leaves?
Perhaps, I only 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
dislodged 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 hue
of emergency exits
seems to ask—
“Since trumpets
often sound so sharp
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 grocery notes,
but never read
her most scarlet longing?
There are some nights I think
Pythagoras only knew 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?
