THE BUDDY BOLDEN CYLINDER

It doesn’t exist, I know, but I lovev

to think of it, wrapped in a shawl

or bridal veil, or, less dramatically,

in an old copy of the Daily Picayune,

and like a nunstaled, unhatched egg

from which, at the right touch, like mine,

the legendary tone, sealed these long years

in the amber of neglect, would peal and re-

peal across the waters. What waters do

I have in mind? Nothing symbolic, mind you.

I meant the sinuous and filth-rich

Mississippi across which you could hear

him play from Gretna, his tone was so loud

and sweet, with a moanin it like you were

in church, and on those old, slow, low-down

blues Buddy culd make the women jump

the way they liked. But it doesn’t exist,

it never did, except as a relic

for a jazz hagiography, and all

we think we know about Bolden’s music

is, really, a melancholy gossip

and none of it sown by Bolden, who

spent his last twenty-four years in Jackson

(Insane Asylum of Louisiana)

hearing the voices of people who spooked

him before he got there. There’s more than one

kind of ghostly music in the air, all

of them like the wind: you can see it

but you can see the leaves shiver in place

as if they’d like to turn their insides out.

WILLIAM MATTHEWS

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young