Jazz Poems

FILLING THE GAP

When Bird died, I didn’t mind

I had things to do—

polish some shoes, practive

a high school cha-cha-cha.

I didn’t even know

Clifford was dead:

I must have been

lobbing an oblong ball

beside the gymnasium.

I saw the Lady

right before she died—

dried, brittle

as last year’s gardenia.

I let her scratch an autograph.

But not Pres.

Too bugged to boo, I left

as Basie’s brass

booted him off the stand

in a sick reunion—

tottering , saxophone

dragging himmlike a stage-hook.

When I read Dr. Williams’

poem, “Stormy,”

I wrote a letter of love and praise

and didn’t mail it.

After he died, it burned my desk

like a delinquent prescription…

I don’t like to mourn the dead:

what didn’t, never will.

And I sometimes feel foolish

staying up late,

trying to squeeze some life

out of books and records,

filling the gaps

between words and notes.

That is why

I rush into our room to find you

mumbling and moaning

in your incoherent performance.

That is why

I rub and squeeze you

and love to hear your

live, alterable cry against my breast

.

Lawson Fusao Inada

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JAZZ POEMS

TRANE

Propped against the crowded bar

he pours into the curved and silver horn

his old unhappy longing for a home

the dancers twist and turn

he leans and wishes he could burn

his memories to ashes like some old notorious emperor

of rome, but no stars blazed across the sky when he was born

no wise men found his hovel, this crowded bar

when dancers twist and turn,

holds all the fame and recognition he will ever earn

on earth or heaven. He learn against the bar

and pours his old unhappy longing in the saxophone

KAMAU BRATHWAITE

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Jazz Poems

CANARY 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 the 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 seige

has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

RITA DOVE

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Jazz Poems

THE DAY LADY DIED

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 feel 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 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 FIVE SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

FRANK O’HARA

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Jazz Poems

WHAT I’M WILD FOR

I broke when I was ten and forty-

year-old Mr. D. was clambering on top of me

and it was all I could do to kick him back, keep

the red ceiling light in sight, and wait

for her to find me. So this is what she’s on

her knees for every night, praying

for Pops to come on back, rip her skirt off

and ride her until it’s only skin she ever wants

to feel again. I wanted to fling that in her face

the way a slick trumpeter cat from Philly

flung any panties at me summer I was fifteen.

I’ve seen more love in Alderson, behind

the warden’s back, behind Jim Crow’s back

on the way home from movies: dykes would touch

hands, feed cigarettes to one another

like they were kisses, before the cells broke us all up–-

forgers, whores, boosters, pushers, users.

The soldiers had it, too, begging for pieces

of my dress and stockings, tearing them to petals

under their noses because they have the smell 

of woman on them. I could love a whole

army like that. But two husbands later

and the hungry I feel is not the 600-miles-a-night

on a bus flashing slow silver between gigs

while my stomach opens wide. The cure

for that is simple as a couple bucks, red beans

and rice. What I’m wild for is a few grains

of dope and the shakes I get from head to satin

feet when it’s “Strange Fruit.” One night, my

body can’t

hold me down, the notes break clean, and no one

can see me, but they point to the voice flying over

the band and say, Billie, nobody sings 

hunger like you do, or love.

JANET M. CHOI

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