The True Sound of the Clarinet

Today I’m serious as a clarinet. Is a clarinet serious? Yes. The clarinet is a serious instrument. It has eighteen or more side holes, necessitated by the need to provide semitones in the primary scale without recourse to fork-fingering, and also to link chromatically the top of the primary scale with the twelfth, where the basic fingering repeats. That’s serious.

Very serious stuff. The solution is green when I widen it into cotton. That is the true sound of the clarinet. Cotton. The behavior of a street is amplified by the alchemy of headlights. And then it becomes cotton. Our eyes widen to accommodate the sanguine simulacrum of sound investing its imagery with unprecedented walking. Walking intended to mimic the sound of the clarinet. Lonely walking. Slow walking. More of an amble, really. A stroll. A pump maneuvering a dream of water into valve and turbine. A country like England. Green hills and limestone. Sheep. Shakespeare. Admonitions in barns. The smell of cattle.

I have a tin goldfish with ten personalities, one of which is flickering a milieu of scales and luminous solitudes of water and coral. The naked grease of insistence captures the sound of a concerto and a needle makes a hole to salt the emotion. A bubble of ancestry unbinds a silent scream of hunger and allows it to moisten on paper.

I summon closure by rattling facts and jewelry. My neck sags with jellyfish. Innocence scurries beneath a saxophone. We medicate a chapter of open feeling which succeeds at jade. The wire sparkles in your drink.

If an animal radiates mass, then mass is an animal, and energy is a visible convulsion knocking the parlor furniture over. My paint feeds wrinkles until the port of entry earns its nipples. The garret is full of brushes. It is a form of sociability. A sign that the sound of the clarinet is welcome. A sign of fusion, the texturing of lips, the resistance of whispers slipping from a drawer.

When the bubble pulls I crackle. I fold my push-ups into a halibut. I tell a story of water whose points cohere into apples. The nails begin to rust. Thin feathers of a beautiful exile mingle there with existence and harden into a voice.

I waddle toward the initiation of a blister and elevate the hammer brain and bring it down to pound words into scales. I am building a dragon of music. It will sound like a clarinet. It will shove the ocean into boiling. It will seclude us from harm. It will punctuate the earth with fire. It will snack on green hillsides and move like a sidewalk steered by an angel of music. Move like an albatross over the solitudes of the southern oceans. Boil into clouds when there are totems on the shore, when there are waves smacking the sand into a wet scintillant sheen, and rocks are precisely what they mean.