Читать книгу Testimony, A Tribute to Charlie Parker - Yusef Komunyakaa - Страница 7
ОглавлениеPART ONE
Jazz Poems
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
RHYTHM METHOD
If you were sealed inside a box
within a box deep in a forest,
with no birdsongs, no crickets
rubbing legs together, no leaves
letting go of mottled branches,
you’d still hear the rhythm
of your heart. A red tide
of beached fish oscillates in sand,
copulating beneath a full moon,
& we can call this the first
rhythm because sex is what
nudged the tongue awake
& taught the hand to hit
drums & embrace reed flutes
before they were worked
from wood & myth. Up
& down, in & out, the piston
drives a dream home. Water
drips ’til it sculpts a cup
into a slab of stone.
At first, no bigger
than a thimble, it holds
joy, but grows to measure
the rhythm of loneliness
that melts sugar in tea.
There’s a season for snakes
to shed rainbows on the grass,
for locust to chant out of the dunghill.
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes
is a confirmation the skin
sings to hands. The Mantra
of spring rain opens the rose
& spider lily into shadow,
& someone plays the bones
’til they rise & live
again. We know the whole weight
depends on small silences
we fit ourselves into.
High heels at daybreak
is the saddest refrain.
If you can see blues
in the ocean, light & dark,
can feel worms ease through
a subterranean path
beneath each footstep,
Baby, you got rhythm.
TOGETHERNESS
Someone says Tristan
& Isolde, the shared cup
& broken vows binding them,
& someone else says Romeo
& Juliet, a lyre & Jew’s harp
sighing a forbidden oath,
but I say a midnight horn
& a voice with a moody angel
inside, the two married rib
to rib. Of course, I am
thinking of those Tuesdays
or Thursdays at Billy Berg’s
in L.A. when Lana Turner would say,
Please sing ‘Strange Fruit’
for me, & then her dancing
nightlong with Mel Tormé,
as if she knew what it took
to make brass & flesh say yes
beneath the clandestine stars
& a spinning that is so fast
we can’t feel the planet moving.
Is this why some of us fall
in & out of love? Did Lady Day
& Prez ever hold each other
& plead to those notorious gods?
I don’t know. But I do know
even if a horn & voice plumb
the unknown, what remains unsaid
coalesces around an old blues
& begs with a hawk’s yellow eyes.
TWILIGHT SEDUCTION
Because Duke’s voice
was smooth as new silk
edged with Victorian lace, smooth
as Madame Zajj nude
beneath her mink coat,
I can’t help but run
my hands over you at dusk.
Hip to collarbone, right ear
lobe to the sublime. Simply
because Jimmy Blanton
died at twenty-three
& his hands on the bass
still make me ashamed
to hold you like an upright
& a cross worked into one
embrace. Fingers pulse
at a gold zipper, before
the brain dances the body
into a field of poppies.
Duke knew how to listen
to colors, for each sigh shaped
out of sweat & blame,
knew a Harlem airshaft
could recall the whole
night in an echo: prayers,
dogs barking, curses & blessings.
Plunger mute tempered
by need & plea. He’d search
for a flaw, a small scar,
some mark of perfect
difference for his canvas.
I hold your red shoes,
one in each hand to balance
the sky, because Duke
loved Toulouse-Lautrec’s
nightlife. Faces of women
woven into chords scribbled
on hotel stationery—blues,
but never that unlucky
green. April 29th
is also my birthday,
the suspicious wishbone
snapped between us,
& I think I know why
a pretty woman always
lingered at the bass
clef end of the piano.
Tricky Sam coaxed
an accented wa-wa
from his trombone, coupled
with Cootie & Bubber,
& Duke said, Rufus,
give me some ching-chang
& sticks on the wood.
I tell myself the drum
can never be a woman,
even if her name’s whispered
across skin. Because
nights at the Cotton Club
shook on the bone,
because Paul Whiteman
sat waiting for a riff
he could walk away with
as feathers twirled
among palm trees, because
Duke created something good
& strong out of thirty pieces
of silver like a spotlight
on conked hair,
because so much flesh
is left in each song,
because women touch
themselves to know
where music comes from,
my fingers trace
your lips to open up
the sky & let in
the night.
WOMAN, I GOT THE BLUES
I’m sporting a floppy existential sky-blue hat
when we meet in the Museum of Modern Art.
Later, we hold each other
with a gentleness that would break open
ripe fruit. Then we slow-drag
to Little Willie John, we bebop
to Bird LPs, bloodfunk, lungs paraphrased
’til we break each other’s fall.
For us there’s no reason the scorpion
has to become our faith healer.
Sweet Mercy, I worship
the curvature of your ass.
I build an altar in my head.
I kiss your breasts & forget my name.
Woman, I got the blues.
Our shadows on floral wallpaper
struggle with cold-blooded mythologies.
But there’s a stillness in us
like the tip of a magenta mountain.
You’re half-naked on the living-room floor
when the moon falls through the window
on you.
Your breath’s a dewy flower stalk
leaning into sweaty air.
JASMINE
I sit beside two women, kitty-corner
to the stage, as Elvin’s sticks blur
the club into a blue fantasia.
I thought my body had forgotten the Deep
South, how I’d cross the street
if a woman like these two walked
towards me, as if a cat traversed
my path beneath the evening star.
Which one is wearing jasmine?
If my grandmothers saw me now
they’d say, Boy, the devil never sleeps.
My mind is lost among November
cotton flowers, a soft rain on my face
as Richard Davis plucks the fat notes
of chance on his upright
leaning into the future.
The blonde, the brunette—
which one is scented with jasmine?
I can hear Duke in the right hand
& Basie in the left
as the young piano player
nudges us into the past.
The trumpet’s almost kissed
by enough pain. Give him a few more years,
a few more ghosts to embrace—Clifford’s
shadow on the edge of the stage.
The sign says, No Talking.
Elvin’s guardian angel lingers
at the top of the stairs,
counting each drop of sweat
paid in tribute. The blonde
has her eyes closed, & the brunette
is looking at me. Our bodies
sway to each riff, the jasmine
rising from a valley somewhere
in Egypt, a white moon
opening countless false mouths
of laughter. The midnight
gatherers are boys & girls
with the headlights of trucks
aimed at their backs, because
their small hands refuse to wound
the knowing scent hidden in each bloom.
GINGKOES
When I retrace our footsteps
to Bloomington I recall talking jazz,
the half-forgotten South
in our mouths, the reptilian
brain swollen with manly regrets
left behind, thumbing volumes
inscribed to the dead in used
bookstores, & then rounding
griffins carved into limestone.
The gingkoes dropped fruit
at our feet & an old woman
scooped the smelly medicine
into a red plastic bucket,
laughing. We walked across
the green reciting Hayden,
& I still believe those hours
we could see through stone.
I don’t remember the girls
in summer dresses strolling
out of the movie on Kirkwood,
but in the Runcible Spoon
sniffing the air, Cat Stevens
on a speaker, we tried to buy
back our souls with reveries
& coffee, the scent of bathos
on our scuffed shoes.
—for Christopher Gilbert
TENEBRAE
May your spirit sleep in peace One grain of corn can fill the silo. —the Samba of Tanzania
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum,
but cries only spring
from your mouth.
Synapse & memory—
the day quivers like dancers
with bells on their feet,
weaving a path of songs
to bring you back,
to heal our future
with the old voices
we breathe. Sometimes
our hands hang like weights
anchoring us inside
ourselves. You can go
to Africa on a note
transfigured into a tribe
of silhouettes in a field
of reeds, & circling the Cape
of Good Hope you find
yourself in Paris
backing The Hot Five.
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum.
As you ascend
the crescendo,
please help us touch what remains
most human. Your absence
brings us one step closer
to the whole cloth
& full measure.
We’re under the orange trees again, as you work life
back into the double-headed
drumskin with a spasm
of fingertips
’til a chant leaps
into the dreamer’s mouth.
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum, always
coming back to opera & baseball.
A constellation of blood-tuned
notes shake against the night
forest bowed to the ground
by snow & ice. Yes,
this kind of solitude
can lift you up
between two thieves.
You can do a drum roll
that rattles slavechains
on the sea floor.
What wrong makes you
loop that silent knot
& step up on the gallows-
chair? What reminds you of the wounded paradise
we stumbled out of?
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum,
searching for a note
of kindness here at the edge
of this grab-wheel,
with little or no dragline
beyond the flowering trees
where only ghosts live—
no grip to clutch the truth
under a façade of skylarks.
—in memory of Richard Johnson
CANTE JONDO
Yes, I say, I know
what you mean.
Then we’re off.
Improvising on what
ifs: can you imagine
Langston & Lorca
hypnotized at a window
in Nella Larsen’s
apartment, pointing at
bridges & searchlights
in a summer sky, can you
see them? Their breath
clouds the windowpanes
one puffed cloud
indistinguishable from another.
They click their glasses
of Jamaican rum. To your
great King, says Lorca.
Prisoner in a janitor’s suit,
adds Langston. Their laughter
ferries them to a sidestreet
in the Alhambra,
& at that moment
they see old Chorrojumo,
King of the Gypsies
clapping his hands
& stamping his feet
along with a woman dancing
a rhumba to a tom-tom’s
rhythm. Is this Florence
Mills, or another face
from the Cotton Club
almost too handsome
to look at? To keep
a dream of Andulusian
cante jondo alive,
they agree to meet
at Small’s Paradise
the next night,
where the bells of trumpets
breathe honeysuckle & reefer,
where women & men make love
to the air. You can see
them now, reclining
into the Jazz
Age. You can hear Lorca
saying he cured his fear
of falling from the SS Olympic
on the road to Alfacar.
But the word sex doesn’t
flower in that heat wave
of 1929, only one man touching
the other’s sleeve, & hands
swaying to “Beale Street Blues.”
CHANGES; OR, REVERIES AT A WINDOW OVERLOOKING A COUNTRY ROAD, WITH TWO WOMEN TALKING BLUES IN THE KITCHEN
Left Column
Joe, Gus, Sham …
Even George Edward
Done gone. Done
Gone to Jesus, honey.
Doncha mean the devil,
Mary? Those Johnson boys
Were only sweet talkers
& long, tall bootleggers.
Child, now you can count
The men we usedta know
On one hand. They done
Dropped like mayflies—
Cancer, heart trouble,
Blood pressure, sugar,
You name it, Eva Mae.
Amen. Tell the truth,
Girl. I don’t know.
Maybe the world’s heavy
On their shoulders. Maybe
Too much bed hopping
& skirt chasing
Caught up with them
God don’t like ugly.
Look at my grandson
In there, just dragged in
From God only knows where.
He high tails it home
Inbetween women trouble.
He’s nice as a new piece
Of silk. It’s a wonder
Women don’t stick to him
Like white on rice.
It’s a fast world
Out there, honey
They go all kinda ways.
Just buried John Henry
With that old guitar
Cradled in his arms.
Over on Fourth Street
Singing ‘bout hell hounds
When he dropped dead.
Your heard ‘bout Jack,
Right? He just tilted over
In prayer meeting.
The good & the bad go
Into the same song.
How’s Hattie? She
Still uppity & half
Trying to be white?
The man went off to war
& got one of his legs
Shot off & she wanted
To divorce him for that.
Crazy as a bessy bug.
Jack wasn’t cold
In his grave before
She gone up & gave all
The insurance money
To some young pigeon
Who never hit a lick
At work in his life.
He cleaned her out & left
With Donna Faye’s girl.
Honey, hush. You don’t
Say. Her sister,
Charlene, was silly
Too. Jump into bed
With anything that wore
Pants. White, black,
Chinese, crazy, or old.
Some woman in Chicago
Hooked a blade into her.
Remember? Now don’t say
You done forgot Charlene.
Her face a little blurred
But she coming back now.
Loud & clear. With those
Real big, sad, gray eyes.
A natural-born hell raiser,
& lose as persimmon pie.
You said it, honey.
Miss High Yellow.
I heard she’s the reason
Frank shot down Otis Lee
Like a dog in The Blue
Moon. She was a blood-
Sucker. I hate to say this,
But she had Arthur
On a short leash too.
Your Arthur, Mary.
She was only a girl
When Arthur closed his eyes.
Thirteen at most.
She was doing what women do
Even then. I saw them
With my own two eyes,
& promised God Almighty
I wouldn’t mention it.
But it don’t hurt
To mention it now, not
After all these years.
Right Column
Heat lighting jumpstarts the slow
afternoon & a syncopated rainfall
peppers the tin roof like Philly Joe
Jones’ brushes reaching for a dusky
backbeat across the high hat. Rhythm
like cells multiplying … language &
notes made flesh. Accents & stresses,
almost sexual. Pleasure’s knot; to wrestle
the mind down to unrelenting white space,
to fill each room with spring’s contagious
changes. Words & music. “Ruby, My Dear”
turned down on the cassette payer,
pulsates underneath rustic voices
waltzing out the kitchen—my grandmama
& an old friend of hers from childhood
talking B-flat blues. Time & space,
painful notes, the whole thing wrung
out of silence. Changes. Caesuras.
Nina Simone’s down-home cry echoes
theirs—Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash—
as a southern breeze herds wild, blood-
red roses along the barbed-wire fence.
There’s something in this house, maybe
those two voices & Satchmo’s gold horn,
refracting time & making the Harlem
Renaissance live inside my head.
I can hear Hughes like a river
of fingers over Willie ‘The Lion” Smith’s
piano, & some naked spiritual releases
a shadow in a reverie of robes & crosses.
Oriflamme & Judgment Day … undulant waves
bring in cries from Sharpeville & Soweto,
dragging up moans from shark-infested
seas as a blood moon rises. A shock
of sunlight breaks the mood & I hear
my father’s voice growing young again,
as he says, “The devil’s beating
his wife”: One side of the road’s rainy
& the other side’s sunny. Imagination—
driftwood from a spring flood, stockpiled
by Furies. Changes. Pinetop’s boogiewoogie
keys stack against each other like syllables
in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day
& Duke. Don’t try to make any sense
out of this; just let it take you
like Prez’s tenor & keep you human.
Voices of school girls rush & surge
through the windows, returning
with the late March wind; the same need
pushing my pen across the page.
Their dresses lyrical against the day’s
sharp edges. Dark harmonies. Bright
as lamentations behind a spasm band
from New Orleans. A throng of boys
are throwing at a bloodhound barking
near a blaze of witch hazel at the corner
of the fence. Mister Backlash.
I close my eyes & feel castanetted
fingers on the spine, slow as Monk’s
“Misterioso”; a man can hurt for years
before words flow into a pattern
so woman-smooth, soft as a pine-scented
breeze off the river Lethe. Satori-blue
changes. Syntax. Each naked string
tied to eternity—the backbone
strung like a bass. Magnolia
blossoms fall in the thick tremble
of Mingus’s “Love Chant”; extended bars
natural as birds in trees & on power lines
singing between the cuts—Yardbird
in the soul & soil. Boplicity
takes me to Django’s gypsy guitar
& Dunbar’s “broken tongue,” beyond
god-headed jive of the apocalypse,
& back to the old sorrow songs
where boisterous flowers still nod on their
half-broken stems. The deep rosewood
of the piano says, “Holler
if it feels good.” Perfect tension.
The mainspring of notes & extended
possibility—what falls on either side
of a word—the beat between & underneath.
Organic, cellular space. Each riff & word
a part of the whole. A groove. New changes
created. “In the Land of Obladee”
burns out the bell with flatted fifths,
a matrix of blood & language
improvised on a bebop heart
that could stop any moment
on a dime, before going back
to Hughes at the Five Spot.
Twelve bars. Coltrane leafs through
the voluminous air for some note
to save us from ourselves.
The limbo & bridge of a solo …
trying to get beyond the tragedy
of always knowing what the right hand
will do … ready to let life play me
like Candido’s drum.
THE SAME BEAT
I don’t want the same beat.
I don’t want the same beat.
I don’t want the same beat
used for copping a plea
as well as for making love
& talking with the gods.
I don’t want the same beat
like a windshield wiper
swishing back & forth
to the rhythm of stolen pain
& counterfeit pleasure.
I don’t want the same beat
when I can listen to early
Miles, Prez, Yardbird, Sonny
Stitt, Monk, Lady Day, Trane,
or the Count of Red Bank.
I don’t want the same beat
as I gaze out at the Grand Canyon
or up at the Dogstar
in a tenement window
or at an eagle who owns the air.
I don’t want the same beat
as the buffoon on the turntable
selling his secondhand soul
to the organ-grinder’s monkey.
I don’t want the same beat
like a pitiful needle
stuck in a hyperbolic groove
at the end of The Causeway.
I don’t want the same beat
as only background
for the skullduggery
of Iceberg Slim on a bullhorn.
I don’t want the same beat
as the false witness,
because I know any man
with that much gold in his mouth
has already been bought & sold.
I don’t want the
same beat.
I don’t want the
same beat.
I don’t want the
same beat.
I don’t want the
same beat.
TO BEAUTY
Just painting things black will get you nowhere. —Otto Dix
The jazz drummer’s
midnight skin
balances the whole
room, the American
flag dangling from his breast
pocket. An album
cover. “Everything
I have ever seen is
beautiful.” A decade
before a caricaturist
draws a Star of David
for a saxophonist’s lapel
on the poster of “Jonny
spielt auf,” his brush
played every note & shade
of incarnadine darkness.
Here’s his self-portrait
with telephone, as if
clutching a mike
like Frank Sinatra—
posed as an underworld
character, or poised
for a dance step.
Shimmy & Charleston.
Perfumed & cocksure,
you’d never know
he sat for hours
darning his trousers
with a silver needle,
stitching night shadows
to facade. The rosy lady’s
orange hair & corsage
alight the dancefloor,
all their faces stopped
with tempera & time.
The drummer’s shirt
the same hue & texture
as a woman’s dress,
balanced on the edge
of some anticipated
embrace. The yellow
feathers of a rare bird
quiver in a dancer’s hat,
past the drum skin tattooed
with an Indian chief.
IGNIS FATUUS
Something or someone. A feeling
among a swish of reeds. A swampy
glow haloes the Spanish moss,
& there’s a swaying at the edge
like a child’s memory of abuse
growing flesh, living on what
a screech owl recalls. Nothing
but a presence that fills up
the mind, a replenished body
singing its way into doubletalk.
In the city, “Will o’ the Wisp”
floats out of Miles’ trumpet,
leaning ghosts against nighttime’s
backdrop of neon. A foolish fire
can also start this way: before
you slide the key into the lock
& half-turn the knob, you know
someone has snuck into your life.
A high window, a corner of sky
spies on upturned drawers of underwear
& unanswered letters, on a tin box
of luminous buttons & subway tokens,
on books, magazines, & clothes
flung to the studio’s floor,
his sweat lingering in the air.
Years ago, you followed someone
here, in love with breath
kissing the nape of your neck,
back when it was easy to be
at least two places at once.
PEPPER
If you were alive, Art
Pepper, I’d collar you
as you stepped off the
bandstand. Last notes
of “Softly as in a Morning
Sunrise” fall between us,
a hint of Africa
still inside your alto.
Someone wants to blame
your tongue on drugs: If I
found out some white broad
was married to a black guy
I’d rave at her in games
& call her tramp, slut,
whore. Did you steal
the Phoenix’s ashes
listening to Bird?
I’m angry for loving
your horn these years,
wooed by the monkey
riding you in L.A.
as if changes in “Mambo
De La Pinta” could be
rounded off to less
than zero. Words
you tried to take back
left blood on the reed.
SATCHMO, USA
Dear Mr. Satchmo,
I’m on the other side
with “Tiger Rag” & “Way Down
Yonder in New Orleans”
on the turntable, a heart
drawn on the soles of my feet.
Here, in the inner sanctum,
I see you toting buckets of coal
to Storyville’s red-light houses.
You are a small figure
raising a pistol to fire
at God in the night sky,
but when I turn to look
out at the evening star
your face is mine. You
are holding a bugle
in your first cutting contest
with fate. From back o’
town to the sphinx
& Buckingham Palace,
to the Cotton Club
& soccer fields in Africa, under
spotlights with Ella & Billie
