Hayden Carruth
What a Wonder Among the Instruments Is the Walloping Trambone!
That elephantine bray in the upper register, that sagacious rumbling down below, that glissing whoop,
A human glory, a nobility—but ach, the good words for goodness have been bollixed in our degradation.
Recall then from the darkness of your adolescence, my still empowering spirit, the names of gladness,
J.C. Higgenbotham, Jim Harrison, Wilbur de Paris, Kid Ory, George Lugg, Dickie Wells, Trummy Young, Honore Dutry, Jimmy Archey,
And although in retrospection Teagarden was overrated, the white names too, Miff Mole, Floyd O'Brien, Brad Gowans, Lou McGarity, Vernon Brown,
May all their persons be never forgotten and their music continue in the ears of the chosen forever!
When the ancients first raised up the ram's horn to the heavens, it was in this loud register.
When mountaineers in their isolation laid down an alpenhorn to sound across the chasms, it was also the same.
And when the medieval genius of orchestra found itself in the voice of the sackbut, it discovered resonance, which is to say, sensuality unlimited.
Let me, spirit, assert no equalness beyond the insanity that is the built-in tragedy of homo sapiens,
But let me nevertheless, a pipping pallid clarinetist, say to the darker masters that although
The tenor sax has seemed the proper instrument for you sensibility, and much sound has come from it,
It is at best a facile machine lately devised by the engineering and anti-musical European intelligence,
Whereas the trombone, known fitly and affectionately as the sliphorn, is truly more near your virtu.
Spirit, let me revere and celebrate in poetry the life of Vic Dickenson, and let me mourn his death.
As for you, pipsqueak literati, for whom all writing is a conspiracy of rhetoric, draw yourselves far off yonder, for here is none of such intention.
Dickenson, no other could sing as you, your blasts, burbles, and bellowings, those upward leaps, those staccato descensions,
Your smears, blurs, coughs, your tone veering from muted to stentorian, your confidences, your insults,
All made in music, musically. Never was such range of feeling so integrated in one man or instrument.
How you made farts in the white mob's face at the Belgian International Exposition and Mr. Bechet laughed out loud.
You were the Wagner of tonal comedy, you were the all-time King of the Zulus, you were jazz.
Thanks be to St. Harmonie for the others, yet next to you they are extraneous to the essence, a throng milling outside.
I learned it all from you (and from a few dozen others), evinced so incompletely in these poems, yet in my mind
A bliss for fifty years, my resource, my constancy in loneliness or loving. Now you are dead.
You grew old, you lost your teeth, you who had seemed indestructible have been destroyed, and somehow I survive.
Not long, however. Hence from aged humility I dare to speak. May these words point to you and your recorded masterwork forever,
Which means as long as our kind can endure. Longer than that, who cares? Thereafter will be only noise and silence.
Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press, 1992.