Then there’s the time four trumpet players came in together
after hours at the Happy Rhone Club in Harlem
where Armstrong was playing the new hot music.
They meant to cut him and thought it might take
four to do it, spelling each other to wear him down.
It must have been something so new,
so brilliant, floating in the air like the hand
of Apollo on the panpipe, on the lyre, and the ripple
into being when air opens and a form is born, a four-beat
pulse under a two-beat rag, the piano player slapping his foot
on the hard wooden floor in a brothel in Storyville
and the quarter notes and pairs of eighths create a
rocking motion which begets a pulse which begets hot
which jazzes it, and it starts to swing.
You can almost see it that way—in the beginning
the pipe-playing Marsyas perched on a rock
and the first elemental sound, the ya ya ya pearling down
through the panpipe and maybe a fragment of prayer
because he must have known it couldn’t derive only
from him Thou art air / Thou art the void, O Lord,
and beside him, the god of light, face bent over the music,
and no hint of the horror to come because who ever imagines
the horror to come, the body swollen with fluid,
a catheter threaded through an artery directly into the heart,
tiny shoes beside huge ankles and feet. No, this is a pastoral
scene, a moment when they can believe,
almost a romance, with nymphs ranged behind the trees
and anyone can see the truth: a rush of breath
on the face of water animated it all, and don’t we believe
in this idyll, the little freshets of color that flare
before the darkening in the sky, the high-rise by the waterside
opaque long before nightfall, and if you don’t believe
you can look in the Bible, here in the front
a special section: Where to Find It: A Remedy for the Blues
or Spiritual Blackout, thumbing through to The Song of Songs,
which is as close as it gets to the landscape of
the Golden Age spread out behind Marsyas, receding to rose-gray.
Sadness needs a setting, for instance any garden—
it’s all birdsong out there in the spicy bitter verdure,
the trill, the throat-fill, air heated up in their tiny chambers
and hurled out repeating Thou art fair, thou art fair,
their song is regret, the last ache in the wound of Paradise,
though why would anyone believe Louis Armstrong
ever regretted his time sentenced to the Waif’s Home for Boys
and there, one day, handed the first cornet, learning fast,
till he was the one blowing a call for just about everything
they did—for soup, for baths, for awakening. So
nothing is not breath—a voice rasping from inside the juke
on Perdido Street: Whistle keeps on blowing and I got my debts
to pay, the boys in knickers and black stockings marching in step
through the mud streets of Storyville carrying banged-up instruments
and the only variable is time, that instant when he knew to take
something simple, declarative and golden, and flatten it a little,
let it vibrate out through the end. And if it feels like it will never end—
and inexplicable, the way you can’t get past a certain truth,
no matter how often you turn it, you’re still up against a self
that never wanted to come into being, not on those terms, not
coming from that past. Life is no Absolute good. And still we
want to live. He never backed down; he rose up, they said,
like an offended lion. When he got angry he could really play,
while the four sat back and he let go—This is how it’s done, boys—
the first wobbling notes, valved longing, a woman leaning into a man,
held up only by music, breath joined in huge arcs passing through
this pure cylinder starting with emptiness. Nobody could cut him.
It’s not the tune that matters, it’s the way you play it.
You can play it for laughs when it isn’t funny,
so when they asked, What do you believe in? he answered,
Nothing, so I guess you got nothing to disabuse me of, the wheel turning
the way he turned it, loose, springy, even brash,
turning a phrase I got my debts to pay into a clear exposition
of the world as it is with its flattened thirds and sevenths
and what if he believed even when he acted otherwise,
believed when he refused to answer, the god long-muscled,
his face bent over the music, and by this time the nymphs
had moved closer, were playing the part of butchers,
one stripping the skin away like plastic wrap, another holding
a propane torch while a Renaissance dog lapped the blood,
and the question put: you’d do anything to stay alive, wouldn’t you?
and hush, the measure of silence, because there’s room inside
a measure for affirmation and denial. The doctor said
they’d agreed to “compromise,” nothing else mattered
but to go on playing. Sometimes he came to that place
where he saw what the music saw and he was the music,
and then the music went on and saw more,
so what could it mean, this heart, with its de dum, de dum,
Wah shoo shoo wah, that would stop the beat?
It don’t mean a thing; a pause, then swaying a little,
the beautiful attack, horn straying only slightly from melody,
that first element, a rush of breath in the mouth
of water, I got a mind to leave this world /
and I got a mind to stay