Blackbird Archive
← v21n3, Spring 2023
Poetry · Volume 21, Number 3

The Tuba

Steve Scafidi

He saw glints of it moving

briskly through the dense

green wall of trees—

the golden form of the elaborate

letter B gigantic being

carried through the woods.

And so he followed it leaving

his hoe and the muddy

field of beans behind

and saw a man half-dressed—

a Shawnee walking with

his daughters on the path,

the shining in his arms a figure

for beauty and majesty

even silent carried

in his arms like a child too tired

to walk—a tuba he eventually

learned its name,

a tuba which he saw later in life

gleaming in the parades

of Springfield and then

in Washington constantly

the sudden shape of his own

imagination moving

through the woods in springtime.

historymusicchildhood
Steve Scafidi

Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (Louisiana State University, 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (Louisiana State University, 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook, Songs for the Carry-On (Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize, and the Miller Williams Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has taught at several universities including, most recently, in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.