A Jazz Trombone Extends a Metaphor, the Length of a Memory

A Jazz Trombone Extends a Metaphor, the Length of a Memory

A jazz trombone extends a metaphor, the length of a memory.  

With a memory, my grandfather says,  

You got to hear its pitch, its tone & blow life into it, then you retract,  

Slide right on back to Winter ‘69  

When the Big Band scene died or the 1956 Klan attack on Nat King Cole;  

More often it’s1930s Long Island NYC  

Where his father met his mother (my great-grandmother)  

& you’re right there on a corner in Brooklyn ‘33,  

& the legend of his father sliding on sidewalks glazed with last night’s ice,  

The cold edging up his shirt. But so many lights & girls  

& men in uniforms with pistols strapped to sides; iron-heavy clouds  

& dark underbellies; sleet was falling.  

This is no tale. It’s just as real as Eubie Blake.  

During the depression my grandfather’s dad was beat;  

Some money came playing sessions, black & white  

Musicians together; black notes on a white page.  

“He’d slide out that trombone, stick it deep into America’s body of silence  

& my mother waited for him on the corner  

Outside the studio in hat & coat, smiling. A sophisticated lady.”  

(Fifteen years later she got sick & the doctors couldn’t save her.)  

Still remembering, here & now, decades later, waiting to put down  

His own trombone and the ghost of his father’s too.  

Is this a dream? Is there a message  

Or can I go back to sleep? O Voy-  

Ager on land & sea through the pass-  

Ages of jazz.  Love & music are all that matter;  

Those trombones, they blow me back to that icy corner in old Brooklyn  

With its pretty girls and bright lights,  

Where I slip & slide & make a funny raspy noise  

With my mouth as I reach out to stop myself falling  

On my ass in front of her, though fall I did.