“Xylophone” is the first thing I published. I’d spent a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland, from January to April 2006. Some days and nights I was bored. I would sit in the computer lab or go to the library and read poetry by myself; I remember specifically Dylan Thomas and Arthur Rimbaud. Perhaps the most formative reading experience, however, was V. Nabokov’s Lolita.

When I got back to the US I submitted this particular poem to my school’s lit mag (I’d spotted a flier in the stairwell). A few months later I picked up my phone. I said HELLO. The person told me my poem would be in the Winter 2007 issue. I expressed some excitement. She said, “OK, wow, it's not that big a deal. I am glad to make your day.”

When it came out, I showed it to my dad. He said, “How did you write this?”

"Xylophone"
 
A rainbow of facile notes, you row of wooden planks
I have at times needed your harmonic smoke
 
you are still my secret pride or prism
of dream coded shapes
 
I laugh as fast as bolts of angular teeth   
to clean off your dusty
maudlin resonance
 
for which I shall build ice cathedrals
–striped–to remember better days of the organic pedal
 
Spiders may consider in jagged fits of metal
on top of your translucent glob  
 
(Rays!} where they someday freeze like hairs
do and smell children
in the darkest cinemas thinking of our music
 
that won amazingly
in the wake of a greater modeled instrument









. . .