Brian Gilmore

for barney bigard, arthur whetsol & lawrence brown you ain’t been blue . . . til you’ve had that mood indigo . . . —Ellington/Mills a young girl is somewhere waiting on the boy she loves; she has seen him every day for the last five years but today he will not come. an old man is down by a river standing at the spot where he saw his only son drown. a woman who never knew her mother but knew her mother did not love her is somewhere walking the streets. i travel to all these places, long to capture that which seems to be our shadow, swells with absurdity recalls jobs we can’t have, hotels we can’t enter restaurants which show us doors instead of menus. ours is a deep dyed emotion; marching bands ragtimers banjo pickers barrelhouse ballers dangerous dance halls segregated neighborhoods too proud to weep what it lives. we are that drama. we are this unusual arrangement that speaks for the millions, that is why this song is full of our dreams heard in late hours on our radios phonographs we love ourselves more sleep well at night rise from our beds to work hard and fancy future triumphs where we are wide awake in the middle of nightmare, this sound will carry us forward and speak to the world in a language that does not lie just a ditty i wrote down one day before the show while my mother prepared supper, and somewhere we were living this mood . . .