Jazz Poems

ALMOST BLUE

Chet Baker, 1929-1988

If Hart Crane played trumpet

he’d sound like you, your horn’s dark city

miraculous and broken over and over,

scale-shimmered, every harbor-flung hour

and salt-span of cabled longing,

every waterfront, the night-lovers’ rendezvous

This is the entrance

to the city of you, sleep’s hellgate,

and two weeks before the casual relinquishment

of your hold—light needling

on the canal’s gleaming haze

and the buds blaming like horns—

two weeks before the end, Chet,

and you’re playing like anything,

singing stay little valentine 

stay

and taking so long there are worlds sinking

between the notes, this exhalation

no longer a voice but a rush of air,

brutal, from the tunnels under the river,

the barges’ late whistles you only hear

when the traffic’s stilled

by snow, a city hushed and

distilled into one rush of breath,

your, into the microphone

and the ear of that girl

in the leopard-print scarf,

one long kiss begun on the highway

and carried on dangerously,

the Thunderbird veering

on the coast road glamor

of a perfectly splayed fender,

dazzling lipstick, a little pearl of junk,

some stretch of road breathless

and traveled into… Whoever she is

she’s the other coast of you,

and just beyond the bridge the city’s

long amalgam of ardor and indifference

is lit like a votive

then blown out. Too many rooms unrented

in this residential hotel,

and you don’t want to know

why they’re making that noise in the hall;

you’re going to wake up in any one of the

how many ten thousand

locations of trouble and longing

going out of business forever everything must go

wake up and start wanting.

It’s so much better when you don’t want:

nothing falls then, nothing lost

but sleep and who wanted that

in the pearl this suspended world is,

in the warm suspension and glaze

of this song everything stays up

almost forever the long

glide sung into the vein,

one note held almost impossibly

almost blue and the lyric takes so long

to open, a little blood

blooming: there’s no love song finer 

but how strange the change 

from major to minor 

everytime 

we say goodbye

and you leaning into that warm

haze from the window, Amsterdam,

late afternoon glimmer

a blur of buds

breathing in the lindens

and you let go and why not

MARK DOTY

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

Miles’ muted horn penetrates

like liquid, melancholy medicine

to the pinched nerve

of an old misery. I’d hit

the winning shot at State that night;

teary-eyed, Tina kissed me—

way past any doubt, then

wore distance like

a torn red dress the next day.

I feel the rend again–in the piano,

I hear her long, practiced excuses

in Coltrane’s troubling tenor—

mixed with the loneliness

I’d felt at seventeen, standing

between rusted railroad tracks

in July.

I turn the lights off–

they go black.

Spare, midnight tones tug at me,

I lean back hard into the past:

I see that winning shot go in,

I see her run at me, again,

and for a moment—she’s there

mingled in Coltrane’s tenor.

What if

I never get past this pain,

just then Miles wavers back in

with an antidote—

traying eights behind

the ivorys. It works

this time, if I only knew

how it means.

DARRELL BURTON

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

LESTER YOUNG

Sometimes he was cool like an eternal

blue flame burning in the old Kansas

City nunnery

Sometimes he was happy ‘til he’d think

about his birth place and its blood

stained clay hills and crow-filled trees

Most times he was blowin’ on the wonderful

tenor sax of his preachin’ in very cool

tones, shouting only to remind you of

a certain point in his blue messages

He was our president  as well as the minister

of soul stirring Jazz, he knew what he

blew, and he did what a prez should do,

wail, wail, wail. There were many of

them to follow him and most of them were

fair–but they never spoke so eloquently

in so a far out funky air.

Our prez done died, he know’d this would come

but death has only booked him, alongside

Bird, Art Tatum, and other heavenly wailers.

Angels of Jazz–they don’t die–they live

they live–in hipsters like you and I

TED JOANS

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

PARKER’S MOOD

Come with me,

If you want to go to Kansas City.

I’m feeling lowdown and blue,

My heart’s full of sorrow.

Don’t hardly know what to do.

Where will I be tomorrow?

Going to Kansas City.

Want to go too?

No, you can’t make it with me.

Going to Kansas City,

Sorry that I can’t take you.

When you see me coming,

Raise your window high.

When you see me leaving, baby,

Hang your head and cry.

I’m afraid there’s nothing in the cream, this dreamy town

A hinky-tonky monkey-woman can do

She’d only bring herself down.

So long everybody!

The time has come

And I must leave you

So if I don’t ever see your smiling face again:

Make apromise you’ll remember

Like a Christmas Day in December

That I told you

All through thick and thin

>On up until the end

Parker’s been your friend.

Don’t hang your head

When you see, when you see those six pretty horses pulling me

Put a twenty dollar silver-piece on my watchchain,

Look at the smile on my face,

And sing a little song

To let the world know I’m really free.

Don’t cry for me

‘Cause I’m going to Kansas City.

Come with me,

If you want to go to Kansas City.

KING PLEASURE (CLARENCE BEEKS)

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

CHARLES PARKER: ALMOST LIKE BEING IN LOVE

These are the shadows of water when water

is thick and no longer transparent

They are everywhere–on the walls

across the ceiling.

It was always this good.

One night you undressed me in your sleep.

Very slowly, you told me later. You said I smelled good.

The sweater i said I’d taken it

out of the drawer where I kept

my winter clothes.

It smelled of pine and a long summer.

No, you said. Not wood.

More like the inside of a saxophone case,

all velvet and sweet regrets.

All blues, I said. Blues

and whatever shadows are made of,

I said, falling on you like slow water.

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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