Jazz Poems

POEM IN WHICH I MAKE THE MISTAKE 

OF COMPARING BILLIE HOLIDAY TO A

COSMIC WASHERWOMAN

We were driving back from the record store at the mall

when Terrance told me that Billie Holiday

was not a symbol for the black soul.

He said, The night is not African American either for

your information,

it is just goddamn dark,

and in the background

she was singing a song I never heard before

moving her voice like water moving

along the shore of a lake

reaching gently into the crevices, touching the pebbles

and sand.

Once through the dirty window of a train

on the outskirts of Hoboken, New Jersey,

I swear I saw a sonnet written high up in a

concrete wall,

rhymed quatrains rising from the

dyslexic alphabet of gang signs and obscenities

and Terrance said he saw a fresco

of brown and white angels flying

on a boarded-up building in Chinatown

and everybody knows

there’s a teenager genius somewhere out there,

a firebrand out of Ghana by way of Alabama,

this very minute in a warehouse loft,

rewriting Moby-Dick-The Story of the Great 

Black Whale

When he burst out of the womb

of his American youth

with his dictionary and his hip-hop shovel,

when he takes his place on stage

dripping the amniotic fluid of history,

he won’t be any color we ever saw before,

and I know he’s right, Terrance is right, it’s

so obvious

But here in the past of that future,

Billie Holiday is still singing

a song so dark and slow

it seems bigger than her, it sounds very heavy

like a terrible stain soaked into the sheets,

so deep that nothing will ever get it out,

but she keeps trying,

she keeps pushing the dark syllables under the water

then pulling them up to see if they are clean

but they never are

and it makes her sad

and we are too

and it’s dark around the car and inside also is very

dark

Terrance and I can barely see each other

in the dashboard glow.

I can only imagine him right now

pointing at the radio

as if to say, Shut up and listen.

TONY HOAGLAND | 1953~2018

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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