Jeffrey Skinner
The New Music Concert: A Drinking Dream
The composer began to speak about the aspens
which had inspired his upcoming piece,
but stopped suddenly in the middle of a word
and confessed that he did not know
an aspen from an oak, had never laid eyes,
could not pick one out of a mugbook of trees
if his life depended, etcetera—he really
gave an eloquent apologia, before breaking
completely into sobs, is tux shirt
bending in little waves. The audience
was stunned—excruciating discomfort!—
and did not know where to turn. A man
with shaved head whipped out a cell phone
and whispered calm instructions to an underling.
The opposing hands of newlyweds
drifted toward each others' inner thighs.
The woman who had commissioned
the new music sat grandly motionless,
a Victorian mansion, gutted by fire. Stagehands
did what they could, moving the spotlight
around the floor, but the composer
would wander back into the light, weeping
and looking down at his hands in disgust,
as if he had dipped them in egg batter. Finally
a member of the brass section, a beauty
who had once been the composer's lover,
leapt up and dragged the composer
into the wings. The curtain of burgundy velvet
descended like a soft guillotine, cutting
off the whole sad affair. Then some
pale guy tiptoed out and announced
that after a short intermission the program
would resume. But I'd had enough. I walked
across the avenue to a bar, the dark kind
with knife scars on the mahogany railing,
and ordered a double. "Double what?" asked
the bartender. Double Aspen," I said, not knowing
what I was saying. But it turns out there is
such a drink, which, the bartender whispered,
if it doesn't kill you will make you famous.
Jeffrey Skinner, I Offer This Container: New and Selected Poems, Salmon Poetry, 2017.