154 Music poems

for Doug Fieger (d. 2010), Berton Averre, Prescott Niles and Bruce Gary (d. 2006) The men don’t know growls Willie Dixon’s most famous tune, but the version I prefer—low fidelity cassette bootleg, howling tin sound with shredded paper drums—remains unreleased, recorded not by some venerable Mississippi blues curmudgeon whose name, artfully dropped here, would evoke afternoons porch-sitting with magnolia wine and box-string guitar, or might bestow upon me some sorely lacking hipster bonafides. That’s never going to happen, since I am talking here about a nearly unlistenable cover, the monophonic noise and mid-range screech of The Knack, live in Hollywood, before a packed house at the Troubador, July 1979. So what if I was twelve? I’d already gotten it, learned how to pluck out the gallop of My Sharona’ s bass, hoping someday I’d ace out Doug Fieger and be Sharona’s back door man myself, though I’d have been better off learning how to get in the front door first. Which was the vaguest country, women, or the blues? I did not know. I still might not. I only knew what I was learning: that a song could actually sound like sweat; that Ray Manzarek, gangly Ray best known as the piano-playing witness to greatness, had dropped by to sit in, and when he’d come down Wonderland Avenue it was a benediction, as if to say,Hey, these guys are all right, forgive them their sins of leather tie and Beatle boot. So I want to say thank you to whatever thought to tape that show, because it taught me that I wanted a forever girl like Sharona, who, as the 45-rpm picture sleeve promised, played the coolest records for her slumber-partying girlfriends, who all looked like the camisoled girls in the Runaways or the equally fated Go-Gos. But I am getting ahead of myself, since, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows how this story ends. I have everything The Knack ever recorded, including this version of Back Door Man, which tells me everything that was wrong with 1979, and later, everything wrong with me. How does the show end? Listen to the cassette, a moment in unsteady time, the Zapruder film of the skinny tie era. For the band, you know how it ends already: rehab, divorce, rehab, forgiveness, comeback tour, state fair nostalgia; immortal Sharona—her real name —sells real estate, million-dollar homes. That’s what those little girls do, they grow up, which reminds me My Sharona, that set-closing number, may be the saddest story I know.

I watch your hands at the keyboard Making music, one hand with a tiny jot, A birthmark I think where finger bone Joins palm, mark of the fish, Living thing in search of a watering Hole set in a walled garden, Or in a field with all the fences torn: Where I hear your father cry into the wind That beats against stones in a small town Where you were born; its cornfields Skyward pointing, never sown, never To be reaped, flagrant, immortal.

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross.

this is the track I've had on REPEAT all afternoon:      she is butterfly brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono if I were foolish like her: but aren't I foolish like her spotting the coil of smoke and the billowed sail against the verge of sky simple on the rise surveying the anchorage:      simple me, signal me dreading the confident assumption of return, dreading more uncertain tone to come, the thinning notes, performance too close to my own impatient—swells, a surge:      sick wind but the emotion is, after all, an artfully conjured gesture arranged marriage between a past ache and frail woodwinds I could skip ahead could break the inconsolable loop of harbor, waiting, overlook, waiting, inevitable waning eye troubled robins, once more in the handkerchief trees once more, brief aquarelle of triplet lilies, blue as willowware in that interval before his embrace falters, stuck, founders [shuffle play]    such a pitch of tenderness in the voice such an awful lot of noise

for Michael S. Harper Billie Holiday’s burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia her signature under that ruined face. (Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass, magic spoon, magic needle. Take all day if you have to with your mirror and your bracelet of song.) Fact is, the invention of women under siege has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

for Thomas Green Bethune Thar he blows! Plus, tusks crushed into grins, grins host to, guest of, impish Nature, her fort/da “jewels” glassified behind blank opposable pupils—Ahabit perfected (“perhaps memory”) by/for the dicey Veil. Auto-didact/-dialectics staged in rent-to-rent “crowded houses,” asea to har-har- poon Terrible Tom’s tom-tom stutter—VAC  C . Gone but for “language, music, imitation and perhaps memory.” Owns no umbrella to forget to splay open like a bucket. Can’t cast down, can’t go singin’ in the there.

Inside the standard lunch hour din they rise, four seamless voices fused into one, floating somewhere between a low hum and a vibration, like the sound of a train rumbling beneath noisy traffic. The men are hunched around a booth table, a fire circle of coffee cups and loose fists, leaning in around the thing they are summoning forth from inside this suddenly beating four-chambered heart.   I’ve taken Avery out on a whim, ordered quesadillas and onion rings, a kiddy milk with three straws. We’re already deep in the meal, extra napkins and wipes for the grease coating our faces and hands like mid-summer sweat.   And because we’re happy, lost in the small pleasures of father and son, at first their voices seem to come from inside us.Who’s that boy singing? Avery asks, unable to see these men wrapped in their act.   I let him keep looking, rapt.   And when no one is paying attention, I put down my fork and take my boy’s hand, and together we dive into the song.   Or maybe it pours into us, and we’re the ones brimming with it.

There’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street In the City as the sun sinks low; And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet And fulfilled it with the sunset glow; And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light; And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again In the Symphony that rules the day and night. And now it’s marching onward through the realms of old romance And trolling out a fond familiar tune, And now it’s roaring cannon down to fight the King of France, And now it’s prattling softly to the moon, And all around the organ there’s a sea without a shore Of human joys and wonders and regrets; To remember and to recompense the music evermore For what the cold machinery forgets. . . . Yes; as the music changes, Like a prismatic glass, It takes the light and ranges Through all the moods that pass; Dissects the common carnival Of passions and regrets, And gives the world a glimpse of all The colours it forgets. And there La Traviata sighs Another sadder song; And there Il Trovatore cries A tale of deeper wrong; And bolder knights to battle go With sword and shield and lance, Than ever here on earth below Have whirled into—a dance!— Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time; Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland; Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!) The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume, The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world’s a blaze of sky The cuckoo, though he’s very shy, will sing a song for London. The Dorian nightingale is rare and yet they say you’ll hear him there At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!) The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu-whoo, of owls that ogle London. For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!) And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorussing for London:— Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time; Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland; Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)

(for Ed and Jenny) greetings as the door opened ticking please listen to this food alone for all the f.b.i. will continue maybe you dozed off i hung by that phone all night suppose he talks * vida later aria * once upon a time not looking for any thing * you’re on your own it’s off it’s on * perhaps it means ragged like that golda my-yeer pre-meer * and pour the old box down a drain * too  much news said the news * r e  o l e * it’s us or rust listener * deep personal regret looking up monday * we can save your head or your body we can shave * even his admission is a subtle lie * in suspense what is cut into the smallest of the * grinding to fill a prescription * drum to the wobble and a roll on the sea come to mind an article of light distance through distance unfinished * piano * willing to believe * national anthem hearer * perfect rhyme to some all cars kept in doors * sophisticated newsmen show how it could have been * retreat from the swiss legation * numbers for an event * corruption why not? * infinite detail is no more real * thought against power * answer it * hooked to just another piece of tape hooked to just one more little piece of tape * through words in to no record * writer righter riter * am: i on replay? * all you do is expand the system * a polaroid of la with the wrong voice print * astronaut amazed at what was expected

Use a new conductor every time-out you have sextet—before foreshore, before pen name gets anywhere near any bogey opera glass (to avoid expulsion to any bogey flunkey that can carry infidel) Handle conductor gently Put conductor on as soon as pen name is hard be sure rolled-up ringworm is on the outspokenness. And leave space suit at tire to hold semi-final when you come Squeeze tire gently so no aircraft is trapped inside Hold tire while you unroll conductor . . . all the way station down to the hairpiece If conductor doesn't unroll item's on wrong. Throw item away Start over with a new onion