DANIEL’S TRUMPET
She didn’t realize what she was doing, just being a smart ass maybe, but before the gig (all week since the invitation she was rolling “gig’ on her tongue like a hard, unfamiliar candy risen to the top of someone else’s candy bag) they were all posing for a photograph, an official one to be used in a magazine, not the New Yorker but a local rag that had a column on what’s happening around town, and she the only poet in the group, the rest musicians, she said I want to hold Daniel’s trumpet and he grinned and passed it to her, and she cradled it as you might a cat, but someone, was it Daniel, said no, hold it like this and adjusted it in her hands till its mouth (did you call it a mouth?) pointed up and the picture was snapped and she must’ve looked more like a musician than the rest of them, the real ones, because she was cradling an instrument, not cradling but holding it properly, the way a trumpet player would, and it was the beginning of a great evening, the most fun she’d had since her husband died eight months ago, posing with nine musicians, most who said they’d never heard a poet read before, and she with the famous fiddler/brass player’s trumpet that he told her he bought in New York twenty years ago, it had a rim of green corrosion around the mouth, and he looked slightly worn too in a charming, rascally way, and told her earlier about his two kids, his divorce, his flat-topped hat a busker’s hat, and she the oldest in the group, in her seventies, the least dope of the bunch, she hoped the photo was black and white like one from long ago, a picture of an unnamed jazz group from the twenties and who’s that older woman on the couch between so and so and so, the trumpet player, she looks so cool.