something in this house, maybe
those two voices & Satchmo’s gold horn,
refracting time & making the Harlem
Renaissance live inside my head.
I can hear Hughes like a river
of fingers over Willie ‘The Lion” Smith’s
piano, & some naked spiritual releases
a shadow in a reverie of robes & crosses.
Oriflamme & Judgment Day … undulant waves
bring in cries from Sharpeville & Soweto,
dragging up moans from shark-infested
seas as a blood moon rises. A shock
of sunlight breaks the mood & I hear
my father’s voice growing young again,
as he says, “The devil’s beating
his wife”: One side of the road’s rainy
& the other side’s sunny. Imagination—
driftwood from a spring flood, stockpiled
by Furies. Changes. Pinetop’s boogiewoogie
keys stack against each other like syllables
in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day
& Duke. Don’t try to make any sense
out of this; just let it take you
like Prez’s tenor & keep you human.
Voices of school girls rush & surge
through the windows, returning
with the late March wind; the same need
pushing my pen across the page.
Their dresses lyrical against the day’s
sharp edges. Dark harmonies. Bright
as lamentations behind a spasm band
from New Orleans. A throng of boys
are throwing at a bloodhound barking
near a blaze of witch hazel at the corner
of the fence. Mister Backlash.
I close my eyes & feel castanetted
fingers on the spine, slow as Monk’s
“Misterioso”; a man can hurt for years
before words flow into a pattern
so woman-smooth, soft as a pine-scented
breeze off the river Lethe. Satori-blue
changes. Syntax. Each naked string
tied to eternity—the backbone
strung like a bass. Magnolia
blossoms fall in the thick tremble
of Mingus’s “Love Chant”; extended bars
natural as birds in trees & on power lines
singing between the cuts—Yardbird
in the soul & soil. Boplicity
takes me to Django’s gypsy guitar
& Dunbar’s “broken tongue,” beyond
god-headed jive of the apocalypse,
& back to the old sorrow songs
where boisterous flowers still nod on their
half-broken stems. The deep rosewood
of the piano says, “Holler
if it feels good.” Perfect tension.
The mainspring of notes & extended
possibility—what falls on either side
of a word—the beat between & underneath.
Organic, cellular space. Each riff & word
a part of the whole. A groove. New changes
created. “In the Land of Obladee”
burns out the bell with flatted fifths,
a matrix of blood & language
improvised on a bebop heart
that could stop any moment
on a dime, before going back
to Hughes at the Five Spot.
Twelve bars. Coltrane leafs through
the voluminous air for some note
to save us from ourselves.
The limbo & bridge of a solo …
trying to get beyond the tragedy
of always knowing what the right hand
will do … ready to let life play me
like Candido’s drum.
THE SAME BEAT
I don’t want the same beat.
I don’t want the same beat.
I don’t want the same beat
used for copping a plea
as well as for making love
& talking with the gods.
I don’t want the same beat
like a windshield wiper
swishing back & forth
to the rhythm of stolen pain
& counterfeit pleasure.
I don’t want the same beat
when I can listen to early
Miles, Prez, Yardbird, Sonny
Stitt, Monk,
