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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