The pianist Joe Sullivan,
jamming sound against idea
hard as it can go
florid and dangerous
slams at the beat, or hovers,
drumming, along its spikes;
in his time almost the only
one of them to ignore
the chance of easing down,
walking it leisurely,
he’ ll strut, with gambling shapes,
underpinning by James P.,
amble, and stride over
gulfs of his own leaving, perilously
toppling octaves down to where
the chords grow fat again
I back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.
In the mornings we’ re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.
for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959,
recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959
No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise:
A thick, twisted stem from the garden
is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn.
Its substance will not survive one thousand years,
nor will the garden, which is today their temple,
nor will their names, nor their union now announced
with ritual blasts upon the zucchini shofar.
Shall we measure blessings by their duration?
Through the narrow organic channel fuzzily come
the prescribed sustained notes, short notes, rests.
If an orchidophage’ s tastebud magnified
resembles an orchid
so my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones.
Love, little by little it dawned on us the artisanal
ice cream, especially the prizewinning caramel,
would be out of our reach,
like the previous Friday of a Sunday leaving the beach,
in the meltdown.
Amy Winehouse
All song is formal, and you
Maybe felt this and decided
You’ d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.)
A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’ s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’ t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’ s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’ s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’ s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
Art was long.
Paul was short.
Art sang the song.
Paul was the sort
who made one up
as if from air.
Paul had more gift.
Art had more hair —
which isn’ t to take
away from Arts.
Many sing well
if someone starts,
and it robs no Simon
to get paid like Paul.
Along was Art’ s way
to be singing at all.
If Paul robbed some,
it’ s harder revealing.
What stuck in his mind,
he stuck to concealing
capable of feeling
while in contact with another?
I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles
facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini’ s angel’ s
silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’ s white one
that’ s practically transparent in his
Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!
Then the bells start, flood the void.
Tennessee: We are here, between trees,
with the tempo of a rosary being strung
in a queue of escalating beads —
Carolina: It’ s not quite the count in
the countinghouse of my chest
but the heart does make an awful attempt
t: and a circle wherever it may be
there was music coming on
c: which though machinery-like
moves not in cogs, and never
springs, but waves through
t: like wired applause for antic backstage
buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it
fades
c: but only after the chorus has pulsed
