154 Music poems

It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay train’s strung-out hoo, deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tiled dome: he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue, while we all wait to be chuted to car lot or home, closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed, every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.

When to her lute Corinna sings, Her voice revives the leaden strings, And doth in highest notes appear As any challenged echo clear; But when she doth of mourning speak, Ev’n with her sighs the strings do break. And as her lute doth live or die, Let by her passion, so must I: For when of pleasure she doth sing, My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring, But if she doth of sorrow speak, Ev’n from my heart the strings do break.

Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/ Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts New York alter city/ black tears/ secret disciples Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground. Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions. Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/ Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/ Death and indestructible existence In that Jazz corner of life Wrapped in a mist of sound His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams Inviting the nerveless to feel once more That fierce dying of humans consumed In raging fires of Love.

The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you, To see you shake your head. The mic may as well Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town To be whipped by a woman's voice. You can't tell The difference between a leather belt and a lover's Tongue. A lover's tongue might call you bitch, A term of endearment where you come from, a kind Of compliment preceded by the word sing In certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you, With a shot of Patrón at the end of each phrase From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can't Remember your father's leather belt without shaking Your head. That's what satisfies her, the woman With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover's tongue— Call me your bitch, and I'll sing the whole night long.

all down on perdido street, from san juan to inglewood, up on that bridge, up where the soul trees grow by soul, dance to fantastic information while we kick off the modern world. the whistle sounded good like a kiss on a train. a track below us in the cabinet in the tunnel under the water. a steady boom to lift us out. nobody lived, not without digging, but he wore that ivory waistcoat and we loved to see that shit. I love my people too much to be around them at school. I slip underneath the cinema tree, move myself in half, dance to fray, write a paper on the salve trade. the big fat women and the heliocopters they bring with them to watch them and their kids. whole long- ass sheets of improper names. we refused to act right at the hospital and I was right with ’em. at the wrong time I started reading my paper and ash flew from their big ol’ legs. we rub down and dance everyday at the broke clinic and I was right with ’em. johnny griffin turns to this long burning to pray for fire. make a song about the sky they stole. if you ain’t gon’ get down then what you come here for? what they bring your ass up in here for if you ain’t gon’ tear shit up? if you wasn’t just as happy to be here as you was to come then what you gon’ do, simple motherfucker? the salve trade

King Oliver of New Orleans has kicked the bucket, but he left behind old Satchmo with his red-hot horn to syncopate the heart and mind. The honky-tonks in Storyville have turned to ashes, have turned to dust, but old Satchmo is still around like Uncle Sam’s IN GOD WE TRUST. Where, oh, where is Bessie Smith, with her heart as big as the blues of truth? Where, oh, where is Mister Jelly Roll, with his Cadillac and diamond tooth? Where, oh, where is Papa Handy With his blue notes a-dragging from bar to bar? Where, oh where is bulletproof Leadbelly with his tall tales and 12-string guitar? Old Hip Cats, when you sang and played the blues the night Satchmo was born, did you know hypodermic needles in Rome couldn’t hoodoo him away from his horn? Wyatt Earp’s legend, John Henry’s, too, is a dare and a bet to old Satchmo when his groovy blues put headlines in the news from the Gold Coast to cold Moscow. Old Satchmo’s gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes set my soul on fire. If I climbed the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh Heaven, Satchmo’s high C would carry me higher! Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip? On Judgment Day, Gabriel will say after he blows his horn: “I’d be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe if old Satchmo had never been born!”

In my car, driving through Black Mountain, North Carolina, I listen to what sounds like Doris Day shooting heroin inside Sly Stone’s throat. One would think that she fights to get out, but she wants to stay free in this skin.Fresh, The Family Stone’s album, came out in ’73, but I didn’t make sense of it till ’76, sixth grade for me, the Bicentennial, I got my first kiss that year, I beat up the class bully; I was the man. But for now, in my head, it’s only ’73 and I’m a little boy again, listening to Sly and his Family covering Doris’s hit, driving down I-40; a cop pulls me over to ask why I’m here, in his town, with my Yankee tags. I let him ask a series of questions about what kind of work I do, what brings me to town—you know the kind of questions that tell you this has nothing to do with driving a car. My hands want to ball into fists. But, instead, I tell myself to write a letter to the Chief of Police, to give him something to laugh at over his morning paper, as I try to recall the light in Doris Day’s version of “Que Sera Sera”—without the wail troubling the notes in the duet of Sly and Cynthia’s voices. Hemingway meant to define courage by the nonchalance you exude while taking cover within your flesh, even at the risk of losing what some would call a melody; I call it the sound of home. Like when a song gets so far out on a solo you almost don’t recognize it, but then you get back to the hook, you suddenly recognize the tune and before you know it, you’re putting your hands together; you’re on your feet— because you recognize a sound, like a light, leading you back home to a color: rust. You must remember rust—not too red, not too orange—not fire or overnight change, but a simmering-summer change in which children play till they tire and grown folks sit till they grow edgy or neighborhood dogs bite those not from your neigborhood and someone with some sense says Down, Boy, or you hope someone has some sense who’s outside or who owns the dog and then the sky turns rust and the streetlights buzz on and someone’s mother, must be yours, says You see those streetlights on don’t you, and then everybody else’s mother comes out and says the same thing and the sky is rust so you know you got about ten minutes before she comes back out and embarrasses you in front of your friends; ten minutes to get home before you eat and watch the Flip Wilson Show or Sanford and Son and it’s time for bed. And it’s rust you need to remember when the cop asks, What kind of work you do? It’s rust you need to remember: the smell of summer rain on the sidewalk and the patina on wrought-iron railings on your front porch with rust patches on them, and the smell of fresh mowed grass and gasoline and sweat of your childhood as he takes a step back when you tell him you’re a poet teaching English down the road at the college, when he takes a step back— to assure you, know, that this has nothing to do with race, but the rust of a community he believes he keeps safe, and he says Have a Good One, meaning day as he swaggers back to his car, and the color of the day and the face behind sunglasses and the hands on his hips you’ll always remember come back gunmetal gray for the rest of this rusty afternoon. So you roll up the window and turn the music back on, and try to remember the rust caught in Sly’s throat— when the song came out in ’73, although I didn’t get it till ’76, sixth grade for me, the Bicentennial; I got my first kiss that year. I beat up the class bully. I was the man.

George Borrow in his Lavengro Tells us of a Welshman, who By some excess of mother-wit Framed a harp and played on it, Built a ship and sailed to sea, And steered it home to melody Of his own making. I, indeed, Might write for Everyman to read A thaumalogue of wonderment More wonderful, but rest content With celebrating one I knew Who built his pipes, and played them, too: No more. Ah, played! Therein is all: The hounded thing, the hunter's call; The shudder, when the quarry's breath Is drowned in blood and stilled in death; The marriage dance, the pulsing vein, The kiss that must be given again; The hope that Ireland, like a rose, Sees shining thro' her tale of woes; The battle lost, the long lament For blood and spirit vainly spent; And so on, thro' the varying scale Of passion that the western Gael Knows, and by miracle of art Draws to the chanter from the heart Like water from a hidden spring, To leap or murmur, weep or sing. I see him now, a little man In proper black, whey-bearded, wan, With eyes that scan the eastern hills Thro' thick, gold-rimmèd spectacles. His hand is on the chanter. Lo, The hidden spring begins to flow In waves of magic. (He is dead These seven years, but bend your head And listen.) Rising from the clay The Master plays The Ring of Day . It mounts and falls and floats away Over the sky-line . . . then is gone Into the silence of the dawn!

amy winehouse All song is formal, and you Maybe felt this and decided You’d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.) When a desire to escape becomes formal, It’s dangerous. Then escape requires Nullity, rather than a walk in the park or a movie. Eventually, nullity gets harder and Harder to achieve. After surgery, I had Opiates. I pushed the button as often as I could. Understood by music was how I felt. An escape So complete it became a song. After that, Elegy’s the only necessary form. steve jobs Say you lost all your money, or turned against your ambition. Then you would be at peace, or Else why does the mind punish the body? Vengeance is mind, says the body. Ever after, you’re a mirror, “silver and exact.” Just like the bug in a string of code, the body defies the mind Or looks in the mirror of the mind and shudders. Better instruments are better because they’re Silver ish but intact. troy davis The clock is obdurate, Random, and definite. Obdurate the calendar. You thump on the cot: another signature. Did it didn’t do it would do it again. And if a deferred dream dies? Please sign the petition. Very good. Let’s hunt for a pen. If you thump, there’s another signature and Signatures are given freely by the signer’s hand. lucian freud Lingering over Unlovely bodies, Couldn’t help Intuitively rendering A whole Nother angel. Facts are Relics — an Effect worth Undertaking: yes, Dear daylight? donna summer Discourse that night concerned the warm-blooded love we felt. On the divan and in the ballroom and on the terrace, we felt it. Now virtue meant liking the look of the face we lay next to. Never mind the sting of the winter solstice. All discourse that night concerned the warm-blooded love we felt. Something lifted us higher. Her little finger told her so, Untangling, with careless skill, the flora of the sexual grove. Master physician with a masterly joy in wrapping up Mud-spattered, coke-dusted wounds at midnight, when it’s too Early to stop dancing and go home. Our lily-minds soothed by her Royalty concealed in the synthesizers in the flora of the sexual grove.

I. sound knots pinned to a fabric-less body form of oak bone a barreled chest the presence of acoustic music over the instrument resting on your lap a limited vehicle               but you knew that having learned tablature the guitar posed in sculpture clear its throat by reaching the oval gap flushed against stomach into its curious sound gather fingers around an inexhaustible voice and play the strings II. bread shaped to song as we ate and fidgeted the pitch of river frozen to stillness           a film reeled and taut swelling water oily in its cold steps before it hardens an utterance before song is shaped a compression of freezing water eating away at its own babbling face III. where are the boxes of clothes the newspaper to scoop inside of cups feel free to comment miss nothing as of chewing a new food these are features of comfort a lower altitude, moved further but           no egg crate to snug the ends of the hutch a chimera of tempered sand speak of her house absolved by the wiping ocean speak of her name by way of mountains the mirrors          silver flaking for the edges of the mirrors leaving only glass             unreflective patches the promised half the unanswerable ruin of aperture                       begging from where you haven’t seen yourself in years