Brass Band Epithalamion
While the sousaphones, walking the bass-line,
groove on a riff, and the crescent moon casts
crumbs of light like a screwdriver on
a cymbal attached to a bass drum played
by a kid in a varsity jacket
and camouflage pants, while the three trombonists
hurl salvos at the crowd on the corner
of Chartres and Frenchman, while twin trumpets
punch pins into the umbrella of our
hand-in-hand understanding of the dark,
while teenage boys, sag and swagger, waggle,
cakewalk, strut and bump, to the snare drum’s roll,
I am content to contemplate streetlights
with you and to wave the white handkerchief
in time with the wedding march that breaks down
across boarded up storefronts and holds us
in a levee of melody more true
and insistent than your pulse, my heartbeat,
our hemoglobin adjudicating
evening. In the small hours that follow, you
will whistle “I’ll Fly Away” on the banks
of the Mississippi and I’ll outlook
the strain a busking violin puts on
my memories of imagined futures,
but for now we listen on the dancing verge
and nothing can curb the sound of this band
as it plays “I Ate Up the Apple Tree,”
welcoming us to the Mardi Gras of
an Eden we’ll be forever leaving.
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Dante Di Stefano earned his PhD in creative writing from SUNY at Binghamton. His poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer’s Chronicle, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, the Bea González Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize.