I see Buddy Bolden on the day he played
himself gone. He is walking in another parade
and they are holding their breath. He is thinking
of all his lovers at once before he can think of them
separate, before he can let them go falling from him
like drops of sweat, like the sunlight turning
his black skin into stone. He wants to play the weight
of that falling. He wants to play their faces.
And then he begins.

I see Buddy Bolden playing his neck to burst,
pouring out notes that don’t exist, filling his horn
with blood. He falls to the street still blowing,
blowing his life into the horn, thinking it could go on
without him, without his thoughts that had become
heavy things, blowing his horn full of savage beauty,
this language inside him.

I see Buddy Bolden moving slow into his shadow life,
in a train, in his dream of a train carrying him to the
hospital where he will die, carrying him away from
remembrance.

I see Bolden’s horn slipping from the crowd unseen,
another unowned child, its empty bloated belly
making it useless. It wants to remember him with songs,
to carry him back onto the street that is longing
for his weight. But it sleeps instead, in the silence
reserved for what is loved and left behind. It sleeps
beneath his bed with the empty bottles and empty shoes
and the outline of his form on the mattress and
his widows shuffling by, whispering with their footsteps
the only remaining music.