The Blues
What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinetand boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?
I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelveyou think the heart and memory are different."'It's a poor sort of memory that only worksbackwards,' the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland.
Although I knew the way music can fill a room,even with loneliness, which is of course a kindof company.
I could swelter through an Augustafternoon — torpor rising from the river — and listento Stan Getz and J.
J.
Johnson braid variationson "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the roomwith me the force and weight of what I couldn'tsay.
What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all about melike a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,but I was quick and furtive as a foxwho has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolismto burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquenceof the becalmed, the plain speech of the leaflesstree.
I had the cunning of my body and a fewbars — 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 clatterwith that boy tied like a bell around my throat,a brave man and a coward both,to break and break my metronomic heartand just enough to learn to love the blues.
Anonymous submission.
William Matthews
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