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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