“Do you think it’s too late for me to learn the french horn?” I texted my friend Jordan, recently.

[I was getting that old familiar feeling of listlessness,  which never fails to cultivate this desire to throw myself headfirst into something completely new, and challenging, and random. Mostly random. When I was seven, I felt destined to play the french horn.... until a member of the Grand Rapids Symphony let me try. I couldn't blow one note outta that thing.]

“No way!” He responded. “It’s never too late. Reed instruments are sexier though.”

Been there (read: nine years of clarinet). I think what he really meant was the saxophone, specifically. I mean, I’m sure there is an instrument fetish for everyone. I’m sure there are “Bassoons are for Lovers” clubs or people who get turned on by oboe solos. But I think the lot of us can agree that the saxophone is universally the sexiest of the reed instruments. Part of me wishes I would have chosen that, versus the clarinet. You can’t really bust out the clarinet on the street corner and look cool. Although, I might resort to that, now that I’m unemployed. (Note to self: Remind parents to send clarinet.)

ANYWAY. The whole point of this entry is to get to the following - whenever anyone mentions the saxophone, I think of the instrument hanging from someone’s neck “like a golden fish.” I knew I had stolen that phrase from a poem, which I just now found. And I’m posting it here, because it’s beautiful, and I never want to lose it again.

Nightclub

By Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don’t hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else’s can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o’clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.