The life and death of a great trumpet player in 19 lines
Michael Gibbs the trumpet player (New Zealand Symphony Orchestra 1952 – 1994) was a good friend. He was turning 80 and I wanted to write him a poem. I had on my noticeboard a French postcard called states and empires of the trade winds. There were trees and the ocean and faces with puffed up cheeks blowing for all they were worth. I imagined Michael as a baby lying in his cot, looking up at this postcard as a poster on the wall. I wondered was it all that vibrating air, that made him reach for a trumpet he’d play all his life?
When the poem begins, Michael’s in concert on the stage. How he got there isn’t important. The support of his father is. The darkness of the hall is temporarily broken by the glow of his father’s cigarette. The cough that followed after inhaling smoke and nicotine, could only be his father’s. The contrast here between light and darkness is important.
There’s a shift in the second stanza to focus on Michael’s father’s life. He had worked in a mine. The coal dust had ruined his lungs. His breathing was laboured. When Michael played the trumpet, his father imagined healthy lungs. The simile used here - your lungs flare like wings - helps develop the ideas of light and freedom and also foreshadow a leaving.
Something changes in the third stanza, introducing a note of unease. Predictions tonight are for gales in exposed places. Michael was terminally ill. The stormy weather hints at what lies ahead.
During the first three stanzas the poem moves from the trumpet as a wind instrument, to breath and lungs. Then comes the renewable energy of turbines on a wind farm followed by the prediction of the negative, destructive threat of gales.
Stanza four opens with South of the divide: Michael has left. He’s prepared. He holds his beloved trumpet and a suitcase. This holds memories for me too of Michael travelling with the NZSO to concerts around New Zealand and overseas. Of him clambering off a bus or plane with his music case. Of meeting him and his wife Alison in a café or hotel after a concert. Michael in tails and white shirt, his top lip indented from the trumpet. Now more relaxed, his rich full laughter spilling into the night.
The final couplet of the poem you accompany the wild totem / of the wind is sombre. Michael’s playing the trumpet is eternal. He returns to nature with his life’s work of trumpet playing. The wind now represents the orchestra he plays in. The wild totem the ancestry and clan of the trade winds on the French postcard.
Looking closer at the layout of the poem, the varying line lengths are like the range of notes produced by the trumpet. They extend and reduce like Michael is playing them. The line to Gustav Mahler conducting a wind farm is the longest. The final line of the wind the shortest.
Michael was also a wonderful trumpet teacher. He used to say to his students Pretend to play in an orchestra, and everyone will think you’re brilliant. Michael never pretended. He never needed to.
the trumpet player
You cannot recall
trumpet lessons, only the glow
of your father’s cigarette
and follow-up cough.
And you remember the darkness
of the concert halls.
Though the mine had long stolen
most of your father’s breath,
he still loved to hear
your lungs flare like wings.
One reviewer likened your playing
to Gustav Mahler conducting a wind farm.
Predictions tonight are for gales
in exposed places.
South of the divide,
with trumpet in one hand
and suitcase in the other,
you accompany the wild totem
of the wind.
"the trumpet player" is included in the new poetry collection Hoof by Kerrin P Sharpe (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25), available in bookstores nationwide, and right now number one on the Nielsen bestseller chart.
