Meiosis
for Gabriel B. Stepto (1970-2003)
by Daniel Wideman

Too weak to shoulder certain burdens,
they don’t write solos for euphonium anymore.
Heavy notes shunted
to the tuba’s familiar foghorn,
mistaking mellow aspect for a withering of bone,
or a birth defect in hornmetal,
like tafia or buckshot spilled into
the brass megma of a cooling Ashanti mold.
Clark Terry holds a horn in each hand.
Trumpet & flugel cradled like twins,
heavy as gunnysacks brimming
with another man’s crop.
His mouth large enough to kiss mistress & wife
with opposite sides of the same tongue,
he blows fours with himself.
The two-horn dozens inside Railroad Porter Blues.
Trumpet is scorned woman.
Sundress swirling on an abandoned stoop,
hands flared on hips,
her magpie shrieks cut and roll
bladed anger that tapers night,
scares the sun home early from the juke.
Flugel is a honeydipped echo of itself,
a silver maple tapped for pitch.
Organblood does not gush from a deep wound,
trickles thick enough to harvest syrup.
Four bars allotted to rebut
DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony,
a quartet of measures
to coo down and salt-cure high crime.
In the solo’s final chorus,
weary of the argument, he throttles
trumpet on an upright stand.
Harmon mute muffles flugel
to a whisper’s whisper,
like the third hiss of trainbrake
that marks a boxcar’s
reluctant surrender:
to the end of the track, to dying
in the final station’s open-armed embrace.

Copyright © Daniel Wideman. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author

Daniel J. Wideman's first volume of poetry, The Music of Scars, will be published by Big Drum Press in June, 2003. He is co-editor of Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (Penguin, 1996) and author of a book of nonfiction, Singing Sankofa (Scribners, forthcoming). His play, Going to Meet the Light, was produced at the Rites and Reason Theatre in Providence in 1994. He is currently working on a novel, A Ticket 'Til Morning, and a memoir about growing up in a multiracial family. Mr. Wideman gathered splinters as a backup point guard at Brown University, and has also studied in England at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies; and at Northwestern University. He has served as writer-in-residence at the DuBois Pan-African Cultural Centre in Accra, Ghana, and at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in the journal Callaloo and in the anthologies Giant Steps: The New Generation of African-American Writers; Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature; Outside the Law: Narratives of Justice in America; and Black Texts and Textuality. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Copyright © 1997-2003 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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