154 Music poems

Four buskers almost balkanized, tonight, August 4th, the Place de la Contrescarpe. Every one of them in wind and limb complete, The accordionist all but a hunchback-- After the first melodious flourishes were done, The clarinet began to take his instrument apart, Blowing shorter tunes, to show the way it worked; But on a keyboard hanging from his neck The carpenter pianist banged out routine chords And the violin a beanpole man was fingering Sliced through the edges of catalpa leaves With long shrieks, rat trills, and all in fun. Cars now orbiting the quadrangle of trees Turned into tubes filled with human meat, Notes took the scent of carnage from their lager (Even so, the buzz of talk, no way to stop it) And cherry red the track suit of its rider, The sliced leaves, iron chains that link Old mooring posts around the beds of flowers. Fogged the eye with fright, and meaning trouble Identical white camper caravans Rolled into view, the one behind the other, For things to jump from, us to be flung into. Rohmahniyah! he shouts, shaking his money pot, The clarinettist,Ceausescu, fini! Whereupon, Classic features, stepping light and fresh From reeds that told secrets of a beauty parlour. A nice Missouri girl, in gree, with pearls To plug each earlobe, pushed her wicker chair aside; Showing a dainty midriff, on steady legs She strolled across the street, as if to depollute With every breath, every stride, the air Our music for a moment had iunhabited. Then the white, lost caravans came back again, Carnation milk inside, stringbags of potatoes, Family snug inside, in each a Belgian grandpa, Peering every which way, at the wheel.

That summer night Was hot Steaming like a crab Luscious under the shell Televisions gone bleary Blinked In front of men In undershirts drinking beer Wives upstairs took showers Caught A glimpse of their backs In hallway mirrors I sat in the dark Invisible On the backporch Drinking in the night And it tasted good So good Going down And somebody like me Blew night through an alto sax Blew and blew His cooling breath His hot cool breath on me— And I came alive Glowing In the dark Listening like a fool

Their singer suffered breakdowns. In their work there was a sense of what it was to live there at that time. One song described the dark around the military vehicles between them and the cocaine waiting in Gramercy. It was about the sepsis that followed love or love repeated as farce, the neck neck neck damaged by an anonymous hand unstringing guitars. They got away with it and worked to abolish youth by knitting and paying half-attention. I thought I was in love because my sentiments were matched by a generic, abiding sense of unfreedom. Nothing survives lovers descrying the red flags of old flames. Nothing is more relatable than an unreasonable person operating subtractively, indulgently, out of exasperation.

Sometimes the blue in Blue Hawaii gets lost. But Elvis’s eyes speak pure Esperanto.

Cigarettes in my mouth to puncture blisters in my brain. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My fingers soft, too soft to rattle rafters in second-rate halls. The harmonies I could never learn stick in Ayler's screams. An African chant chokes us. My image shot. If you look off over the Hudson, the dark cooperatives spit at the dinghies floating up the night. A young boy pisses on lovers rolling against each other under a trackless el. This could have been my town, with light strings that could stand a tempo. Now, it's the end of an ethnic dream. I've grown intellectual, go on accumulating furniture and books, damning literature, writing “for myself,” calculating the possibilities that someone will love me, or sleep with me. Eighteen-year-old girls come back from the Southern leers and make me cry. Here, there are coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun. Here, we shoot off every day to new horizons, coffee shops, bars, natural tonsorial parlors, plays, streets, pamphlets, days, sun, heat, love, anger, politics, days, and sun. It is the end of an ethnic dream. My bass a fine piece of furniture. My brain blistered.

In the United terminal in Chicago at five on a Friday afternoon The sky is breaking with rain and wind and all the flights Are delayed forever. We will never get to where we are going And there’s no way back to where we’ve been. The sun and the moon have disappeared to an island far from 
anywhere. Everybody has a heartache — The immense gatekeeper of Gate Z–100 keeps his cool. This guardian of the sky teases me and makes me smile through the mess, Building up his airline by stacking it against the company I usually travel: Come on over to our side, we’ll treat you nice. I laugh as he hands me back my ticket, then he turns to charm The next customer, his feet tired in his minimum wage shoes. Everybody has a heartache — The man with his head bobbing to music no one else can hear has that satisfied Feel — a full belly of sweet and a wife who sings heartache to sleep. In his luggage (that will be lost and never found) is a musty dream of flying Solo to Africa, with a stop on the return to let go the stories too difficult to Carry home. He’ll take off his shoes to walk in a warm, tropical sea. He’ll sing to the ancestors: Take me home to mama. No one cooks like her. But all the mamas worked to the bone gone too young. Broken by The Man. Everybody has a heartache — Everyone’s mouthing fried, sweet, soft and fat, While we wait for word in the heart of the scrambled beast. The sparkle of soda wets the dream core. That woman over there the color of broth did what she was told. It’s worked out well as can be expected in a world Where she was no beauty queen and was never seen, Always in the back of someplace in the back — She holds the newest baby. He has croup. Shush, shush. Go to sleep, my little baby sheepie. He sits up front of her with his new crop of teeth. Everybody has a heartache — This man speaks to no one, but his body does. Half his liver is swollen with anger; the other half is trying To apologize — What a mess I’ve made of history, he thinks without thinking. Mother coming through the screen door, her clothes torn, Whimpering:It’s okay baby, please don’t cry. Don’t cry. Baby don’t cry.

sound opens sound shank of globe             strings floating out something like images are here opening up avenues to view a dome a distant clang reaches the edifice. understanding what it means to understand music

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 . . .

On an island of music in a city of drumbeats the drum dream girl dreamed of pounding tall conga drums tapping small bongó drums and boom boom booming with long, loud sticks on bit, round, silvery moon-bright timbales. But everyone on the island of music in the city of drumbeats believed that only boys should play drums so the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming quiet secret drumbeat dreams. At outdoor cafés that looked like gardens she heard drums played by men but when she closed her eyes she could also hear her own imaginary music. When she walked under wind-wavy palm trees in a flower-bright park she heard the whir of parrot wings the clack of woodpecker beaks the dancing tap of her own footsteps and the comforting pat of her own heartbeat. At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts and the dragon clang of costumed drummers wearing huge masks. At home, her fingertips rolled out their own dreamy drum rhythm on tables and chairs… and even though everyone kept reminding her that girls on the island of music have never played drums the brave drum dream girl dared to play tall conga drums small bongó drums and big, round, silvery moon-bright timbales. Her hands seemed to fly as they rippled rapped and pounded all the rhythms of her drum dreams. Her big sisters were so excited that they invited her to join their new all-girl dance band but their father said only boys should play drums. So the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming and drumming alone until finally her father offered to find a music teacher who could decide if her drums deserved to be heard. The drum dream girl’s teacher was amazed. The girl knew so much but he taught her more and more and more and she practiced and she practiced and she practiced until the teacher agreed that she was ready to play her small bongó drums outdoors at a starlit café that looked like a garden where everyone who heard her dream-bright music sang and danced and decided that girls should always be allowed to play drums and both girls and boys should feel free to dream.

1. The earth is dry and they live wanting. Each with a small reservoir Of furious music heavy in the throat. They drag it out and with nails in their feet Coax the night into being. Brief believing. A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies. And in this night that is not night, Each word is a wish, each phrase A shape their bodies ache to fill— I’m going to braid my hair Braid many colors into my hair I’ll put a long braid in my hair And write your name there They defy gravity to feel tugged back. The clatter, the mad slap of landing. 2. And not just them. Not just The ramshackle family, the tíos, Primitos, not just the bailaor Whose heels have notched And hammered time So the hours flow in place Like a tin river, marking Only what once was. Not just the voices of scraping Against the river, nor the hands Nudging them farther, fingers Like blind birds, palms empty, Echoing. Not just the women With sober faces and flowers In their hair, the ones who dance As though they’re burying Memory—one last time— Beneath them. And I hate to do it here. To set myself heavily beside them. Not now that they’ve proven The body a myth, a parable For what not even language Moves quickly enough to name. If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments. If I lean into the desire it starts from— If I lean unbuttoned into the blow Of loss after loss, love tossed Into the ecstatic void— It carries me with it farther, To chords that stretch and bend Like light through colored glass. But it races on, toward shadows Where the world I know And the world I fear Threaten to meet. 3. There is always a road, The sea, dark hair,dolor. Always a question Bigger than itself— They say you’re leaving Monday Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?