The Fire Landscape: Poems

The Horns of Guy Lombardo

The Horns of Guy Lombardo Because I am ten-years-old and unashamed, Because I’ve played the trombone for a year And can read songs from a book of standards, I walk off our porch to play “Auld Lang Syne” At midnight to my family’s applause. My parents must know that a year from now I will refuse to play for our neighbors, But this is how we spend the first two minutes Of 1956, the year before I would fret about sex and God’s absence. I am as confident as the flood light That illuminates the black, simple notes And casts shadows so dark on the driveway I can see the slide extend and retract Like the sluggish tongue of an ancient frog. My father is about to be thirty-eight, His nails, even on off-days, black with work. That evening, he knows his bakery Will fail, groceries filling with cheap bread And cake mixes easy enough for fools. My mother’s body is beginning to sag With the weight of her collapsing thyroid And the heavy numbers of blood pressure, But she smiles and begins to sing the words Like someone who expects to recover. p24 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 24 The snow, I imagine, is softening My tone, making me sound as mellow as The horns of Guy Lombardo, what the rest Of the world kisses along to unless They have stumbled outside at midnight, close Enough to catch my song, hearing something Like resolutions flung into the air. 25 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 25 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 26 ...