AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION WITH THE HORNS OF THE OX IN PARADOX
As a boy,
a scarlet plush toy
I named Pythagoras
made joyful horse noises
only I could hear—
until adolescent teeth
on a bike sprocket of logic
severed his single horn.
Newly numb and seeking
to sew together his psalm,
I took up the trumpet.
Assuming no mistranslation
did Pythagoras not praise
units of music as sacred math—
numbers raised to the highest power?
Note the angle as
the throats of birds
raise the seeds of melody
in the sharpness
of their beaks—
is this not the geometry
my school trumpet sought
as moonlight muted
our shoebox apartment,
and I pined to practice
what beauty was aloud?
There are nights
I believe Pythagoras
allowed for the i
in either pine
or lyric as sine of
an imaginary unit.
But I still don't know,
if the bird part of our brains
co-signed the cones
of language only to tango
our tangents towards
evergreen music.
I once heard Roy Hargrove
raise his blue horn and ask
if scarlet could bloom
as the sacred need inside a needle
—whether record or pine—
to sow slivers of air
into meters 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 can form many fugues
—a simple logic—
since death was once branded
with the fire of the fleur de lis,
but could that be how
we 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 played the horn,
I tried to collect lyrics on my lips
as dew collects on dogwood leaves.
Perhaps, I only took up the horn
to learn how to hold Apophenia
as a useful fiction
and collect her breath
in the bowl of my collar bone.
dislodged a front tooth,
i tried to tongue my trumpet again,
but found only a hard groove.
Red graffiti scrawled
in a school bathroom stall
said a one armed man
can never play the violin.
And yet, every emergency
exit seems to blink—
“Since trumpets sound sharp,
what trumpeter’s mouth
isn’t an unread wound”?
Have you heard how
jazz master Lee Morgan
could read his Beloved’s sheet music
as easily as her grocery notes,
but couldn’t even read
her least scarlet longing?
There are nights
a distant horn persuades me
Pythagoras only knew music
as a grammar of sound
making sentences,
but listen—who amongst us hasn’t
needed to wholly number the hoarse notes
galloping out of a bridled mouth?
