Tuba

by Wren Tuatha

The anaconda
doesn’t really want the tuba.
She covets that real estate
on the floor of the Amazon
where it landed.

Who gave the orchestra
the smallest boat, anyway?

I can go anywhere on Earth
except the past.  That violent,
silent gurgle when life debated
rock and radiation.

Would I sit by that tide pool,
cradling a tuba
and fix my embrasure to sound, radiate
out through Earth’s juvenile atmosphere
and into space?  A foghorn,
calling /warming /noting the time

so that some afternoon in the future,
twelve musicians and an anaconda
play poker for possession of a tuba.