BEHIND THE LINES
Though “Tuba” was composed almost entirely from imagination, David Huddle notes that his poem is full of autobiography. “In my teens, I was a passionate musician—though tuba wasn’t my instrument,” the professor of English says. “A tenor sax player, I was part of a small dance band—‘The Mellowtones,’ I think we were called—that was hired for a New Year’s Eve party at the Martha Washington Inn.” Huddle adds that music taught important lessons during his youth in rural Virginia—“that beauty was available to ordinary people, that it required hard work, and that it felt wonderful to make. I also grew up in the Episcopal Church, and in my head, I still carry around phrases like ‘the life everlasting.’ Neither an Episcopalian nor a musician nowadays, I called upon both those forces from my early life to make a poem that celebrates human possibility.”
“Tuba” is part of David Huddle’s new poetry collection Glory River, recently published by Louisiana State University Press.
TUBA
by David Huddle
The vibrating airstream
blown into its mouthpiece
contains spit, halitosis,
food particles, dust mites,
along with a few atoms of oxygen
that in 2435 BC circulated
among the pyramid-builders
of ancient Egypt. This stream
of air with assorted hitchikers
serpentines through the metal
tube, navigating the valves
that process it into the exact
tone (an E-flat two octaves
below middle C) that was and is
its orchestral destiny—and now
this human-generated, machine-
shaped column of atmospheric
disturbance migrates toward
the larger and larger territory
of the horn’s great shining bell,
out into the light of a summer
afternoon in the resort hotel’s
concert garden—
Ah the Note!
Finally the one note is sounded
at 3:13 p.m. on July 31, 1958,
behind the Martha Washington Inn
in Abingdon, Virginia. The spit,
the food, the dust mites, and even
the pyramids-educated oxygen
atoms—it all sweetly diperses
into the warm sunlight, a bass
E-flat worth suffering to hear,
the sonic equivalent of the grassy,
dandelioned lawn in Winslow Homer’s
turn-of-the-century croquet game,
a tone so deep and sonorous it’s God
harmonizing with the angels, a slice
of sound that lets me suddenly and only
for half an instant understand gazebos,
giraffes, the Jersey shore, China
far away in darkness, how
to unhook a brassiere as an act
of affection, the necessity of death,
and the life everlasting.
Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Glory River: Poems by David Huddle. © 2008.
