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 Nightsun
Sascha Feinstein
After You've Gone
for 64842
They forged my horn in '25,
these craftsmen I'll never know
who sweated evenings by fires
that blazed their busy town
into the topographical map
of American music: Elkhart,
Indiana. This soprano sax,
a "low pitch" Martin,
changed hands how many times
in the fifty-five years before
my father and his two brothers
purchased the saxophone
for me? It's not that I desire
to live in Yeats' Byzantine dream,
reborn as a golden bell fashioned
to keep a drowsy audience awake,
but today I'm whistling tunes
I'm sure the artisans hummed
while they steadied their hands
to imprint this dazzling filigree
and the final brand: a serial number
to remind each generation
how many musicians
the horn outlives.
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Sascha Feinstein won the 1999 Hayden
Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso (Copper
Canyon Press 2000). Individual poems have appeared in publications
such as American Poetry Review, North American Review,
Ploughshares, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is the
author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s
to present, and co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakka) of The Jazz
Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set.
Recent Awards include a 2002 poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts. He is Professor at Lycoming College in Williamsport,
PA, where he chairs the English department and edits Brilliant
Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.
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