I’ve Lost My Whistle

No longer can I call down my birds
or speak Bird.
It’s a good thing I have no dog.

A woman stands
in front of a pet-store window.
There are dogs inside.
Her strident whistle is a siren,
and the dogs all rush to the window
and press their muzzles against it.

For a taxi, while cooking or idling,
for those dogs. For a beautiful woman passing
(though I have never done that; well, once).
On your birthday, before dancing, to the sound of singing,
tune of selling old clothes from a cart.
Of the knife sharpener,
the butcher,
while waiting for the dough to rise.
And of my father, calling us home
from a night of kick-the-can,
in 1945.

A young man comes down the street whistling a tune
from the American Song Book,
half forgotten.
I Remember You. He’s lost
in the complicated chord changes,
and by the time he reaches me
it’s a glorious confusion,
very much like Coltrane.

A bartender, a bell-hop, another taxi,
while you work, wetting it,
Dixie, to start the game,
in the dark, blowing it on some corporate criminal, of a train,
after love, past the graveyard,
among ancient ruins,
answering the placid sea.

It’s all gone.
I’m an old man counting these losses.
I can no longer accompany their going
with a tune.