George’s Harmonica
- George’s Harmonica
Arnold Lindquist said I haven’t played a harmonicafor ninety-five years when he heard or was told if he could hear he’d hear George Lewin of Brooklyn playing the harmonica he got in nineteen thirty-eight when he was thirteen (significantly younger than the Swede from Iowa) it’s still in its perfect box it’s stillshiny the wood is like new the instructions say you’ll have many years of satisfaction made in Germany George reading e-mail from his rabbi George primo uomo considerably louder than the harp he plays when wondering Are you girls are okay? offers to serenade only the ladies one at a time with what Junior at the Checkerboard called Mississippi saxophone autographed gave two to Walter (not Big or Little, he called himself Middle) [End Page 119] hear how the blue names accrue Jim Self comes over happy hour won’t spill its chardonnay before he too plays Oh Susannah [End Page 120]
sandra mcpherson is the author of five books from Ecco, three from Wesleyan, and, most recently, Outline Scribe and Certain Uncollected Poems, both from Ostrakon, and Expectation Days, from University of Illinois Press. She taught twenty-three years at the University of California at Davis and four years at the University of Iowa, and has new poems forthcoming in the Yale Review. She resides among the people evoked in “George’s Harmonica.”
