A elegy to instruments I no longer know.

In fourth grade I was completely 
disinterested in everything that had to
do with the oboe other than 
the idea of playing the oboe.
I was the counterculture kid
born with two different colored
Chuck Taylors and short
brown hair stiff from my
father's blue hair gel. To play
guitar wouldn't subvert expectation
enough for my ten-year-old standards-- so
I bit double reeds and learned the 
noise Gila monsters make when they're
trying to imitate jazz musicians--
That instrument shed silver
keys like snake skin and I left
my oboe's carcass in a case
at the back of the music room--
I took on the fabricated audacity
of brass when I played trumpet for
less than a year-- it always sounded too
loud and I worried who I was waking up
with the anxious declarations 
coming from my bell.
I played taps on the porch 
for no one and the birds scattered
from all the limbs of the big pine tree--
I blew out the spit valve 
on the carpet and kissed the
wide mouth piece like a sibling.
I still waltz brielfy with the ghost 
of my brother's fiddle in the
sleep-walk hands of an impatient 
artist who could never wait
for the instrument-- held it down
and told it to sing like a seraph--
I pretend there's not a Bedell
with abalone fret board in 
a body bag in the corner
of my bed room at the house on
Noble Street. I kept a piano as
a mistress-- slept with her on 
snow-day mornings.The blue guitar
was always for my father--
the man who tied my Chuck Taylors 
and told me that John Lennon
was a God and that punk
was a prophecy brought to 
us from sex pistols and 
pinned down by the fret board
of Kurt Cobain. 
But I went to Scarborough Fair 
with my Bedell and I broke
her string sometimes but she
always forgave me-- she
told me that there was something 
to love about a creature
whose fingers were often
slippery and whose thumb
pushed on her neck too hard.
She told me I would be okay
and that I didn't always need to
practice. She told me my lap
was enough for her and 
I am most sorry to my
Bedell who caressed the scars
on my hips and burn mark
on my forearms. She knew I would
never be a musician but
she knew that I could hold
myself together with dead
chord progressions. She used
to love how I bushed her unshaven
legs without a pick-- pulled
my thumb on the base note
and plucked her strings like
a harp-- she thought she could
have been a harp in another life.
And she is a quiet woman
now. I left her my widow
and I make songs with poems now
but she will always be
something like Parsley, Sage,
Rosemary, and times
I pulled music from her throat.