Trombone

Like everything else was then

it was handed me down from my brother.

I played it badly, out of spite, because

I’d wanted a trumpet or drums and because

it was a mortifying thing for a guy to cart around:

green-blue many-sized blemishes on the bell

like on the Star Trek planet where kids lived

hundreds of years till they hit pubescence,

then got sick/went insane/died horribly,

the mouthpiece fused in place, the spit

valve with the cork knocked off and a green ring around it,

also the tuning slide dinged and unremovable,

which must have bred ungodly things

down in there, things my breath spewed during concerts

towards the girls in the audience, who could smell disease.

Every girl’s body another incomprehensible curved tube.

What had my brother done

to leave the horn this way and the case half-broken too:

slid it down the three-story banister?

some horrible sexual thing with the case closed?

My brother could have done that,

he could have done anything.

That’s why he left me hauling

the damned thing around under one arm, bookbag over the other,

physically pressed down by it all, under the arm

because there was no handle,

and the case with a broken lock that at least twice

sent the whole Lovecraftian thing clattering

down on the pavement with the purest sound it ever made,

bell and slide and cold cream rolling in different directions

with the girls all watching, every girl’s body

sliding like that: frictionless, impossible

to put in the exact right place. This is why we have

the past, why time exists: so that I do not have to

live this over and over again, as I did then.