I still can’t get over it. All these fellow creatures
together enabling such surpassing beauty,
some of them having started — when? —
perhaps in grade school band, where I
definitively failed to learn the trombone.
The trombone! How its custodians must revere Copland
or those triumphant passages in the second movement
of Saint-Saens’ Third Symphony. You don’t just hear but also see trombonists,
reaching, reaching to take their part, practiced fingers busy,
breath perfected through years of fierce devotion.
I still can’t get over it, as I remember cleaning over
and over the foul accumulation from my trombone’s spittoon.
