154 Music poems

For a birth The fact of the harp swells into the air, Alien and familiar and entirely too large, An elephant lost in the suburbs, And opens with its cry a strange passage Between the harp itself, the fragile harp, And the almost guilty knowledge Of   the stroke of   luck that brought it here And the care with which it must depart.

I sang my songs so much that they became the soundtrack for my dreams, the melody of my moods, a room I lived in, and a balm for my wounds. I sang my songs enough to know them backward and forward, enough to wonder if they could lift me from hometown haunts to center stage. I’d sung my songs enough to think I could take on Baltimore’s best talent at the Harlem Theatre Amateur Hour and maybe even win. If you sing a song enough, it can go to your head that way.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . . He did a lazy sway. . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can’t be satisfied— I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.” And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Rather than hold his hands properly arched off the keys, like cats with their backs up, Monk, playing block chords, hit the keys with his fingertips well above his wrists, shoulders up, wrists down, scarce room for the pencil, ground freshly to a point, piano teachers love to poke into the palms of junior pianists with lazy hands. What easy villains these robotic dullards are in their floral- print teaching dresses (can those mauve blurs be peonies?). The teachers’ plucky, make-do wardrobes suggest, like the wan bloom of dust the couch exhaled when I scrunched down to wait for Mrs. Oxley, just how we value them. She’d launch my predecessor home and drink some lemonade, then free me from the couch. The wisdom in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where Monk grew up, is that those names, Thelonious Sphere, came later, but nobody’s sure: he made his escape by turning himself into a genius in broad daylight while nobody watched. Just a weird little black kid one day and next thing anybody knew he was inexplicable and gone. We don’t give lessons in that. In fact it’s to stave off such desertions that we pay for lessons. It works for a while. Think of all the time we spend thinking about our kids. It’s Mrs. Oxley, the frump with a metronome, and Mr. Mote, the bad teacher and secret weeper, we might think on, and everyone we pay to tend our young, opaque and truculent and terrified, not yet ready to replace us, or escape us, if that be the work.

A guy comes walking out of the garden Playing Dark Eyes on the accordian. We’re sitting on the porch, Drinking and spitting, lying. We shut our eyes, snap our fingers. Dewhurst goes out to his truck Like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing And brings back three-half-pints. A little whirlwind occurs in the road, Carrying dust away like a pail of water. We’re drinking serious now, and O.Z. Wants to break in the store for some head cheese, But the others won’t let him. Everybody laughs, dances. The crossroads are all quiet Except for the little man on the accordian. Things are dying down, the moon spills its water. Dewhurst says he smells rain. O.Z. says if it rains he’ll still make a crop. We wait there all night, looking for rain. We haven’t been to sleep, so the blue lizards On the side of the white porch Lose their tails when we try to dream. The man playing the music looks at us, Noticing what we’re up to. He backs off, Holding up his hands in front, smiling, Shaking his head, but before he gets half way Down the road that O.Z. shoots him in the belly. All summer his accordian rotted in the ditch, Like an armadillo turning into a house payment.

Dear Ol' Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw, I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is Never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party.Trill stands for what is truly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse.Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is Never mistake what it looks like for what it is

So I go to Ashenda to get some fix Shandar there playing his lute & a dark haired angel combing a violin I cry Anatolia! Anatolia! I'm a nightingale shrieking dawn's first flick I'm the unknown soldier singing it's me again I say one more & I'm ready for the Western World Then I'm at a bar with Lucinda & we're drooling on the body on discipline and the reign of Robespierre Then it's consummation time & I say hey there's a ram butting at the door & a widow's crying for something I say Lucinda I've got a drum in my belly & she says I'm a goddamn shivering eel Then it's polka on a South Dakota lawn Shandar doodling Shahrazad stomping by the window soaking up the light Then we all smoke Camels & Lucinda says I wish I could live without having to disown & I say yeah tell me more about that

Imagine having enough left to break a bottle over it. Listen how pretty, listen for glass in nothing nearby shattering, just morning birds that do not wake whoever is not sleeping. Come here Little Birdie,

I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home, late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this — the one bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face; how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood: I spied another bird, also calling, its foot inexplicably caught in the car’s closed door, beating its whole bird body against it. Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free. And who knows how long he’d been there, wailing. Who knows — he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat. They called to me — something between squawk and chirp, something between song and prayer — to do something, anything. And, like any good god, I disappeared. Not indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. And, most likely, on my way home from another heartbreak. Call it 1997, and say I’m several thousand miles from home. By which I mean those were the days I made of everyone a love song. By which I mean I was lonely and unrequited. But that’s not quite it either. Truth is, I did manage to find a few to love me, but couldn’t always love them back. The Rasta law professor. The firefighter’s wife. The burlesque dancer whose daughter blackened drawings with m s to mean the sky was full of birds the day her daddy died. I think his widow said he drowned one morning on a fishing trip. Anyway, I’m digressing. But if you asked that night — did I mention it was night? — why I didn’t even try to jimmy the lock to spring the sparrow, I couldn’t say, truthfully, that it had anything to do with envy, with wanting a woman to plead as deeply for me as these sparrows did, one for the other. No. I’d have said something, instead, about the neighborhood itself, the car thief shot a block and a half east the week before. Or about the men I came across nights prior, sweat-slicked and shirtless, grappling in the middle of the street, the larger one’s chest pressed to the back of the smaller, bruised and bleeding both. I know you thought this was about birds, but stay with me. I left them both in the street — the same street where I’d leave the sparrows — the men embracing and, for all one knows (especially one not from around there), they could have been lovers — the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear of the other —Baby, baby, don’t leave me this way. I left the men where I’d leave the sparrows and their song. And as I walked away, I heard one of the men call to me, please or help or brother or some such. And I didn’t break stride, not one bit. It’s how I’ve learned to save myself. Let me try this another way. Call it 1977. And say I’m back west, South Central Los Angeles. My mother and father at it again. But this time in the street, broad daylight, and all the neighbors watching. One, I think his name was Sonny, runs out from his duplex to pull my father off. You see where I’m going with this? My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow. Sonny fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow. And me, years later, trying to get it all down. As much for you — I’m saying — as for me. Sonny catches a left, lies flat on his back, blood starting to pool and his own wife wailing. My mother wailing, and traffic backed, now, half a block. Horns, whistles, and soon sirens. 1977. Summer. And all the trees full of birds. Hundreds, I swear. And since I’m the one writing it, I’ll tell you they were crying. Which brings me back to Dolphy and his transcribing. The jazzman, I think, wanted only to get it down pure. To get it down exact — the animal racking itself against a car’s steel door, the animals in the trees reporting, the animals we make of ourselves and one another. Stay with me now. Don’t leave me. Days after the dustup, my parents took me to the park. And in this park was a pond, and in this pond were birds. Not sparrows, but swans. And my father spread a blanket and brought from a basket some apples and a paring knife. Summertime. My mother wore sunglasses. And long sleeves. My father, now sober, cursed himself for leaving the radio. But my mother forgave him, and said, as she caressed the back of his hand, that we could just listen to the swans. And we listened. And I watched. Two birds coupling, one beating its wings as it mounted the other. Summer, 1977. I listened. And watched. When my parents made love late into that night, I covered my ears in the next room, scanning the encyclopedia for swans. It meant nothing to me — then, at least — but did you know the collective noun for swans is a lamentation? And is a lamentation not its own species of song? What a woman wails, punch drunk in the street? Or what a widow might sing, learning her man was drowned by swans? A lamentation of them? Imagine the capsized boat, the panicked man, struck about the eyes, nose, and mouth each time he comes up for air. Imagine the birds coasting away and the waters suddenly calm. Either trumpet swans or mutes. The dead man’s wife running for help, crying to any who’d listen. A lamentation. And a city busy saving itself. I’m digressing, sure. But did you know that to digress means to stray from the flock? When I left my parents’ house, I never looked back. By which I mean I made like a god and disappeared. As when I left the sparrows. And the copulating swans. As when someday I’ll leave this city. Its every flailing, its every animal song.

Under Venus the sugared wound, the heart-strung-up, the viola d’amore. Under Venus the Pliny-prescribed, the horsehair-hanked — not plucked, tugged — the singly sung (catgut kidney-cuffs the caterwaul, a knockback to the viola bastarda). Kittenish! A scalloped flirtatious border — florid cordial pansies (candied adoration).Violaodorata. Parfait d’Amourish.