154 Music poems

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme Sex fingers toes in the marketplace near your father's church in Hamlet, North Carolina— witness to this love in this calm fallow of these minds, there is no substitute for pain: genitals gone or going, seed burned out, you tuck the roots in the earth, turn back, and move by river through the swamps, singing:a love supreme, a love supreme; what does it all mean? Loss, so great each black woman expects your failure in mute change, the seed gone. You plod up into the electric city— your song now crystal and the blues. You pick up the horn with some will and blow into the freezing night: a love supreme, a love supreme— Dawn comes and you cook up the thick sin 'tween impotence and death, fuel the tenor sax cannibal heart, genitals, and sweat that makes you clean— a love supreme, a love supreme— Why you so black? cause I am why you so funky? cause I am why you so black? cause I am why you so sweet? cause I am why you so black? cause I am a love supreme, a love supreme:

This lip, too, used to curl a little easier, and we, all of us, must enter our Vegas years. Blessed the pacemakers, blessed the painkillers, blessed our famed quiffs grown flyaway, grown thin, the gray starting to sprout under the dye. So much to hide beneath the spit and mascara. So much to powder puff and trim. Nose hairs, for instance, and sideburns, the skin seasick as we’re made to play dress-up one final time. A daughter’s bracelet slipped over a wrist, and, for the ring finger, a lightning bolt ring. How far we venture from a love of peanut butter and Wonder Bread, how far from a Stutz Bearcat and Kahlil Gibran. From codeine, meperidine, diazepam, the room with the teddy bears and the empty syringe. How far from the last book we dived into to learn about sexual positions and astrological signs. And far, too, from the myth of our baritones coming alive in Tupelo, of how we could turn on and off the rain. “That’s the way the mop flops,” I think he’d say, as they lay him out flat under the chandelier, then in the limousine. “That’s the way the mop flops,” as five men enter his mausoleum with water, cement, and a wheelbarrow full of sand, the instruments set down, the stage lights dimmed, “Thank you very much! Goodnight, Graceland.”

for my father Vivid and heavy, he strolls through dark brick kitchens Within the great house of Esterhazy: A deaf servant’s candle Is tipped toward bakers who are quarreling about The green kindling! The wassail is Being made by pouring beer and sherry from dusty bottles Over thirty baked apples in a large bowl: into The wassail, young girls empty their aprons of Cinnamon, ground mace, and allspice berries. A cook adds Egg whites and brandy. The giant glass snifters On a silver tray are taken from the kitchen by two maids. The anxious pianist eats the edges of a fig Stuffed with Devonshire cream. In the sinks the gallbladders Of geese are soaking in cold salted water. Walking in the storm, this evening, he passed Children in rags, singing carols; they were roped together In the drifting snow outside the palace gate. He knew he would remember those boys’ faces. . . There’s a procession into the kitchens: larger boys, each With a heavy shoe of coal. The pianist sits and looks Hard at a long black sausage. He will not eat Before playing the new sonata. Beside him The table sags with hams, kidney pies, and two shoulders Of lamb.A hand rings a bell in the parlor! No longer able to hide, he walks Straight into the large room that blinds him with light. He sits before the piano still thinking of hulled berries. . . The simple sonata which He is playing has little To do with what he’s feeling: something larger Where a viola builds, in air, an infinite staircase. An oboe joins the viola, they struggle For a more florid harmony. But the silent violins now emerge And, like the big wing of a bird, smother everything In a darkness from which only a single horn escapes— That feels effaced by the composer’s dream. . . But he is not dreaming, The composer is finishing two performances simultaneously! He is back in the dark kitchens, sulking and counting His few florins—they have paid him With a snuffbox that was pressed With two diamonds, in Holland! This century discovers quinine. And the sketchbooks of a mad, sad musician Who threw a lantern at his landlord who was standing beside A critic. He screamed:Here, take the snuffbox, I’ve filled It with the dander of dragons!

When Albert Murray said the second law adds up to the blues that in other words ain’t nothing nothing he meant it not quite the way my pops says nomads don’t show emotions but more how my grandmother warned that men like women with soft hands blood red nails like how Mingus meant truth if  you had time for it facts if  you got no time that years pass. Zero one two three and the man you used to flirt with you can no longer flirt with thank goodness. He’s now a man you can’t wear your  jaw out on about weather news or work a perfect strawberry buried beneath a peck.

When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine Like the burnished spears of a field of gold; When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine, And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold; Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle, For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle. And you take a stalk that is straight and long, With an expert eye to its worthy points, And you think of the bubbling strains of song That are bound between its pithy joints— Then you cut out strings, with a bridge in the middle, With a corn-stalk bow for a corn-stalk fiddle. Then the strains that grow as you draw the bow O’er the yielding strings with a practiced hand! And the music’s flow never loud but low Is the concert note of a fairy band. Oh, your dainty songs are a misty riddle To the simple sweets of the corn-stalk fiddle. When the eve comes on and our work is done And the sun drops down with a tender glance, With their hearts all prime for the harmless fun, Come the neighbor girls for the evening’s dance, And they wait for the well-known twist and twiddle, More time than tune—from the corn-stalk fiddle. Then brother Jabez takes the bow, While Ned stands off with Susan Bland, Then Henry stops by Milly Snow And John takes Nellie Jones’s hand, While I pair off with Mandy Biddle, And scrape, scrape, scrape goes the corn-stalk fiddle. “Salute your partners,” comes the call, “All join hands and circle round,” “Grand train back,” and “Balance all,” Footsteps lightly spurn the ground, “Take your lady and balance down the middle” To the merry strains of the corn-stalk fiddle. So the night goes on and the dance is o’er, And the merry girls are homeward gone, But I see it all in my sleep once more, And I dream till the very break of dawn Of an impish dance on a red-hot griddle To the screech and scrape of a corn-stalk fiddle.

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, in their living room, on a winter night, through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent air was thick-alive with pearwood, ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse howled, and cat skreeled, and then, when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us, over us, in us, I felt I was hearing the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening and grieving and scathing, along each other, scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that woods of hating longing, and I knew and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, there—and then, at a distance, I sensed, as if it were thirty years ago, a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, straying toward, and then not toward, and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted to warn him away, to call out to him to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, but his beauty was too moving to me, and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the covert, any more, and so I prayed him come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.

Born like the pines to sing, The harp and song in m’ breast, Though far and near, There’s none to hear, I’ll sing as th’ winds request. To tell the trend of m’ lay, Is not for th’ harp or me; I’m only to know, From the winds that blow, What th’ theme of m’ song shall be. Born like the pines to sing, The harp and th’ song in m’ breast, As th’ winds sweep by, I’ll laugh or cry, In th’ winds I cannot rest.

When the world was loveliness I was A composer, Borodin, my left eye Level with the floor beside toy men. Wild work and havoc they made, Being glad. I could draw a line Would run straight through the minds of men, Being a sociable angel, Music before and after, blushing. Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible. I was a child on the floor beside you, Making music, becoming small in the rosy Embrace of God’s best messenger. I loved your havoc and your hair.

So I would hear out those lungs, The air split into nine levels, Some gift of tongues of the whistler In the invalid’s bed: my mother, Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations of one song; It is called Buckdancer’s Choice. For years, they have all been dying Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Of traveling minstrel shows; With them also an old woman Was dying of breathless angina, Yet still found breath enough To whistle up in my head A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel, An ex-slave who thrivingly danced To the ring of his own clashing light Through the thousand variations of one song All day to my mother’s prone music, The invalid’s warbler’s note, While I crept close to the wall Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break Through stratum after stratum of a tone Proclaiming what choices there are For the last dancers of their kind, For ill women and for all slaves Of death, and children enchanted at walls With a brass-beating glow underfoot, Not dancing but nearly risen Through barnlike, theatrelike houses On the wings of the buck and wing.