2024 Fall Final Poetry Analysis

The Myth of Music

for my father

If music can be passed on like brown eyes or a strong left hook, this melody is my inheritance, lineage traced through a title track, displayed on an album cover that you pin to the wall as art, oral history taught on a record player, the lessons sealed into the grooves like fact. This is the only myth I know. I sit on the hardwood floors of a damp November, my brother dealing cards from an incomplete deck, and I don’t realize that this moment is the definition of family, collective memory cut in rough-textured tones, the voice of a horn so familiar I don’t know I’m listening, Don’t know I’m singing, a child’s improvisation of Giant Steps or Impressions:¹ songs without lyrics can still be sung.

In six months, when my mother is 2,000 miles away, deciding if she wants to come home, I will have forgotten this moment, the security of her footsteps, the warmth of a radiator on my back and you present in the sound of typing your own accompaniment, multiphonics disguised as chords in a distant room, speakers set on high to fill the whole house with your spirit, your call as a declaration of love.

But the music will remain. The timeless notes of jazz too personal to play out loud, stay locked in the rhythm of my childhood, memories fading like the words of a lullaby, come to life in a saxophone’s blow. They lie when they say music is universal—this is my song, the notes like fingerprints as delicate as breath. I will not share this air with anyone but you.

¹Giant Steps is a jazz album (1960) by John Coltrane. Impressions (1963) is another album by Coltrane.