Jazz Poems

TRANE Propped against the crowded bar he pours into the curved and silver horn his old unhappy longing for a home the dancers twist and turn he leans and wishes he could burn his memories to ashes like some old notorious emperor of rome, but no stars blazed across the sky when he was born no wise men found his hovel, this crowded bar when dancers twist and turn, holds all the fame and recognition he will ever earn on earth or heaven. He learn against the bar and pours his old unhappy longing in the saxophone

KAMAU BRATHWAITE

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

CANARY For Michael S. Harper Billie Holiday’s burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia her signature under the ruined face. (Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass, magic spoon, magic needle. Take all day if you have to with your mirror and your bracelet of song.) Fact is, the invention of women under seige has been to sharpen love in the service of myth. If you can’t be free, be a mystery. RITA DOVE

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

THE DAY LADY DIED It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille Day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feel me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing FRANK O’HARA

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

WHAT I’M WILD FOR I broke when I was ten and forty- year-old Mr. D. was clambering on top of me and it was all I could do to kick him back, keep the red ceiling light in sight, and wait for her to find me. So this is what she’s on her knees for every night, praying for Pops to come on back, rip her skirt off and ride her until it’s only skin she ever wants to feel again. I wanted to fling that in her face the way a slick trumpeter cat from Philly flung any panties at me summer I was fifteen. I’ve seen more love in Alderson, behind the warden’s back, behind Jim Crow’s back on the way home from movies: dykes would touch hands, feed cigarettes to one another like they were kisses, before the cells broke us all up–- forgers, whores, boosters, pushers, users. The soldiers had it, too, begging for pieces of my dress and stockings, tearing them to petals under their noses because they have the smell  of woman on them. I could love a whole army like that. But two husbands later and the hungry I feel is not the 600-miles-a-night on a bus flashing slow silver between gigs while my stomach opens wide. The cure for that is simple as a couple bucks, red beans and rice. What I’m wild for is a few grains of dope and the shakes I get from head to satin feet when it’s “Strange Fruit.” One night, my

body can’t

hold me down, the notes break clean, and no one can see me, but they point to the voice flying over the band and say, Billie, nobody sings  hunger like you do, or love. JANET M. CHOI

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Jazz Poems

JAZZ

I’d like to know everything

A jazz artist knows, starting with the song

“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

Like to make some songs myself

“Goodbye Rickshaw,”

“Goodbye Lemondrop,”

“Goodbye Rendezvous.”

Or maybe even blues:

If you fall in love with me I’ll make you pancakes

All morning. If you fall in love with me

I’ll make you pancakes all night.

If you don’t like pancakes

We’ll go to the creperie. If you don’t like pancakes

We’ll go to the creperie.

If you don’t like to eat, handsome boy,

Don’t you hang around with me.

On second thought, i’d rather find

The fanciest music I can, and hear all of it.

I’d rather love somebody

And say his name to myself every day

Until I fall apart.

ANGELA BALL

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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