Louis and The Wolf

I have come to wonder if Louis Armstrongand The Wolf ever met—what a sight that,a grand summit meeting complete with growling,Wolf licking his harp and Satchmo grinning away,deftly fingering his horn in an effort to curtailthe sonic boom of the two most powerful voicesever gathered in the walls of a single room.Snarling and stalking that elegant whisper,I imagine Wolf laying tracks and Louis soremarkably dignified, so clearly in the furrowsof the groove, prowling the stage like the shadowof a storm cloud while Wolf raged and bit downon the low chord changes like a chainsaw blade,a ragged sound refined by the shimmering honeyof the Great Dipper's rising horn, so perfectlyabove the fray. Howling down on all fours,writhing on the stage and King Louis, with hishandkerchief flying like a flag on a mahoganygalleon, hurtling across the choppy sea's wake.Wolf, bursting with Delta moan and the evilways of a tail dragger for Satan, forsaking hismother's gospel hysterics and earning herundying neglect, right up to his final deathbed.Named for a president, Chester Arthur Burnettwas born under a bad sign, Halley's Cometburning across the sky like a brakeman's lantern,but a bluesman will survive staring straight intothe sun like a rifle with eyes. Old Satch wouldknow, his thunderous percussive purr emergingfrom the earth like a fountain of pent feeling,meticulous in its placement as it repeatedlyechoed the punch of the brass lines and thecymbal set to ride. His cornet weatheredevery swinging era, Bird's heebie jeebiesand the Big Band's muskrat rambles, always

sailing and seldom misbehaving, not sincethe rancid Storyville days and the ColoredWaif's Municipal Boy's Home, his bodypeppered black and blue with blows untilthe bent boy escaped via the Mississippi ona light-littered steamboat, its giant wheeljust the juju and propulsion needed to healthe nuance of a genius whose rules are its own,and those last quiet notes with the crowd so stillyou could hear a rat pissing on cotton, the gleamingcorner of a note set to crackle, piercing the racialgloom of the American heart like buckshot,his trumpet bell uplifted and ringing. And thoughthe rain may ooze and lovers lose that feeling,the moon melt down and the earth finally findits ceiling in the poisoned heavens, there willstill be a sound overwhelming all others, a hornpoised flaming in our imagination, though theearth be smothered and fire rise a final timeinside the webbing of our skin. One touch ofnature makes the whole world kin, said Ulyssesto a pouting Achilles, his own mind boilingwith the shock of recognition, both boundin worship like Louis and The Wolf, whosedream meeting probably never took place,though my mind cannot erase the wish of it,the sheer bliss and pitch and rich oppositionthat the scene presents, a listening like I havenever experienced, gears within gears grindinguntil the wounds are wound together, the graceof music calming every child's feathers, arm in armas they rise and sing in the Gulf's fearsome swelter.