The Middle 1950s
We were early adolescents, uneasy times.
Mixed parties began to happen, with games
of Post Office, Spin-the-Bottle, and others — much needed,
since anything self-initiated
seemed hopeless, at least to me, so wretchedly shy,
so daunted to think of approaching a girl.
I or Bruce or Phil, my nemesis,
contrived the notion of forming a band.
We ached for a ploy to blunt our loneliness.
In fact, it’s wrong of me to say we:
I wished small luck on Bruce and none on Phil.
Those unreachable girls would turn from Elvis,
politely lifting needles, enduring our efforts.
Phil sat at some household’s piano and played,
while Bruce blew his trumpet and I my clarinet.
We had a paltry repertoire,
just two or three half-learned numbers to labor through
before we offered our self-styled encore.
I’m speaking of When the Saints Go Marching In,
which was as close to rock n roll
as folks had discovered back then. White folks, that is:
we didn’t know R&B, any more than we did
that our signature song derived from Second Line,
up-tempo tunes in funeral processions
returning from New Orleans’s so-called colored graveyards
over half a century past.
To witless young Caucasians like us, untutored,
these unnamed saints brought jitterbug wiggles
in living rooms with rugs rolled up to walls.
Did I dream of love of wife and child
or that that would one day be my heart’s desire?
Today the late-May sounds of upper New England,
seem to add a touch of shame to our shameful old sounds:
tree frogs trill their melodies
and water coursing in freshets is undersong
to other wondrous music around me.
Meanwhile I’m stunned at how the years have gone by
while I’ve lived beside a rough dirt road
here in a stamp-sized town in a far northern state.
Not for the first time, I marvel at fate:
There are so many different other ways
in which I might have fashioned a life,
but by this time it seems I can’t imagine those others.
I’m old enough too that I really don’t want to.
Though this world appears so different from the old one I’ve conjured,
I hear Bruce’s trumpet in the black flies’ hum;
Phil misses the flatted third in a chord– it’s a raven;
a blue jay squawks from the crown of a hemlock–
my reed’s got a chip. For the briefest instant, again
it’s as though I face the world alone,
as guileless and baffled as ever I was back then,
when a makeshift, discordant trio strove
to invite the unknown saints to come marching in.