Mean Horn

That old lover could play a mean horn; number three reed thrummed by the lesser and less nervous tongue, her pert breast pulled under the neck strap as she tongued and clicked notes that seemed like bagpipe vibrato in brass. That one time we played together, it was shortly after we first made love - your lip quivered and you asked me how many women I had known. The downstairs abandoned in your mothers house; the air just starting to bitter with the approach of summer. We would wander into old bookstores and smell the mold and wonder what the Victorians would think. I picked up some Kafka, reiterated in graphic novel. We ate something, somewhere - saw the capitol building at twilight and played in the castrated canons. We were loved and unafraid of it. You wouldn't say love though; and why would we. We were young, but we knew better than our parents old words. Love meant I will leave you when our children are just the right age to be burnished by it. We needed no punctuation. You smoked clove cigarettes on the porch, I looked around the side lawn. Your father was dying slowly then, faster than us though. It all happened in a few months, and we clearly forgot to be feminists when we would talk about our bodies occupying the same time and space - we forgot even the old poets when we disregarded the romantic notions - perhaps I was an jutting building and you were Roarke and the air was acidic enough to bring us toppling like a ground floor stuffed with nitroglycerin. I never believed that. I still hope that the old blueprints will be found and you can slather some cement over old bricks enough to find a place to stand. In that rubble you were delightful. Soft thumb on your altissimo register, plugging away at old numbers and sinewy melodies. Scales and arpeggios baby, that's all we were back then. You were the pitch to my modulation. You were an old New England capital and a red barn. I was dust and forget and pride and desire. You were calm and I was eloquent.