
Jazz Poems
BLUE IN GREENMiles’ 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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