?Interrobang! · Track 78 · middle

Must You Play the Instrument of Your Own Land

OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): private stationery used only for secret creative work. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Trumpet Player Tom — didgeridoo maker from Arnhem Land; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: the deep Outback of the Simpson. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Tom crafts termite-hollowed didgeridoos though he's a Trumpet Player; left his private creative journals in the deep Outback. Must you play the instrument of your own land?

Lyrics

Red sand on my forearms.
Munga-Thirri. The air smells of ironbark and time.
And here, half-buried... your pages.
Your other voice.

They know your hands, Tom.
On the Eucalyptus tetrodonta, the termite-hollowed heartwood.
You tap out the dried mud plugs, listening for the pitch.
The drone that the earth itself made.
Your breath shaping the beeswax mouthpiece.
A sound that belongs to this place.
A sound they expect from you.

But they call you Trumpet Player Tom.
And here in the Simpson, I find your secret song.
Must you play the instrument of your own land?
Is the only true note the one they understand?

This isn't wood. It's paper.
Not hollowed by insects, but filled with your own ink.
Lines and clefs. A melody for brass, not breath on wood.
Three valves, a spit key, a bell pointed at the sky.
Nothing like the sound that comes from the ground up.
You carried this score out to the deepest red.
You left it where the spinifex grows.

They call you Trumpet Player Tom.
While you carve the drone of Arnhem Land.
Must you play the instrument of your own land?
Is the only true note the one they understand?

Did the hot wind sound like a horn section to you?
Did you hear a solo in the high, thin insect drone?
A secret music, born so far from here.
A homesickness for a sound you'd never call your own.
You left the proof here, in the heart of the silence.
A song for no one.

The pages whisper in the wind.
A different kind of drone.
Trumpet Player Tom.
Must you?