ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST
for J. B. (June 3, 1952 – June 4, 2004)
I woke up with your number on my tongue,
still dreaming, fingers reaching for a phone.
Some contractor had needed a bassoon—
Rameau’s Les Indes galantes. And then it stung
me, you were dead, had died while fairy roses
bloomed by your back door. You’d blown out candles
hours before, left jobs to colleagues—Handel’s
Fireworks, a Rite of Spring—loath to expose
how sick you were. You’d wished to fade away
on your own terms, had hoped to spare us yet
another death. Last night I heard the fourth
Bach suite and felt regret—sassy bourrée
with your part rumbling down below. I’ll bet
it’s swell to hobnob with the reed god at his court.
*
Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of Vanitas (Texas Tech University Press, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, ONE ART, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
