Charlie (Bird) Parker’s Horn(s)
Denise Low
1.
The plastic saxophone he played just once only his spit inside the toy-sized yellow bell what he could find last minute after pawning his own horn —heroin takes no breaks— not missing a beat in his life of a jazz genius. He lived just to age thirty-four. “He’d play anything,” said Jimmy Heath to a friend.
2.
Kansas City, Kansas, a place where fistfights broke out in bars nightly where lived cowboys and free blacks never enslaved and Delaware Indians Wyandots all mixed with Czechs no one wanted where matriarchs ran the town, into the 1970s, and now where blues live. Where Bird’s father met a Choctaw woman Addie Bailey on the safe side of the Big Muddy where miscegenation laws didn’t exist this wide-open river town where ruffians never were tamed where Charlie Parker drew first breaths from lungs made by angry angels. Such fire he breathed in.
3.
At the Smithsonian his Cadillac of a saxophone —sterling silver engraved with his name and etched Easter lilies the showcase model from King’s Musical Instruments. Custom-made fingerings mother-of-pearl keys— what a beauty for the pawn shop not long before death a whirlwind of brass after the storm of his life the alto highs the lightning riffs.