Tag: Poetry

Jazz flows across the Mississippi.

A polite and encouraging announcer presents:
   a businessman from Davenport,
   a chiropractor with
   his brother from Sacramento,
   a lawyer from Moline,
   a Catholic priest from Argentina,
   and a band leader from Orlando.

They will play jazz.
"The way it is supposed to be played," he said.
"The way Bix would have liked it."

I wander the levee toward the roller dam
   where water churns.

A collector, steeped in passion,
   and at home,
   makes piles of Beiderbecke 78s...

He might say,
to the gathered musicians, 
"These songs sound mighty good,"
yet prefer the dust and scratches
of his collected disks.

Water churns through the dam.

I consider when there was no jazz to remember,
   before the grid of streets and buildings,
   and return to a native place.

In a heartbeat of clarity and intuition I see...
   famous forebears surveying the plats...
   and wonder what happened 
   to Black Hawk's bones.

While jazz flows across the river.

~ Undated from some summer in the 1970s

Red Sky at Dusk

A redness fills the room
   where I spent hours practicing guitar.

It is the setting sun
   refracting its rays.

Securing my thermal blanket,
   I rest in bed.

With or without a red presence,
   I'll close my eyes and ears,
      leaving me with memories...

To dream... of musical notes infused with red sunsets.

~ Undated from the mid-1970s

This morning you bumped
your own dresser.
Knocking a pack of Certs,
wintergreen flavor,
onto the floor.

One cert flew loose and
landed in your mouth.

Then you awoke
and I had
a fresh mint taste in my mouth.

I had another.

~ Iowa City, 1973-1974.

I don't want that old thing
that you had before.

I just want to tell you
one thing:

I want to play baseball

now

at the park

because there's no baseball space here.

No baseball space at all.

~ Spring/Summer 1989

Summer came today
Cool, windy, clear.

On the weathered picnic bench
I sawed limbs,
fallen during the storm,
into firewood.

She stacked the logs
on the deck
near the gate leading to the
driveway.

~From my Indiana Journal circa 1988

~ July 3, 1976, Davenport, Iowa.

~ July 8, 1976, Fort Benning, Georgia.

I'm still here

     listening to the rain
     falling outside my window.

I'm still here.

~Aug. 18, 1975

Editor’s Note: I flew from Amsterdam to Montreal in late October 1974. I took a bus from there to Davenport, Iowa. There was not a lot to do on the 24-hour bus trip so I wrote this poem/song. I never finished it. It’s a slice of that life.

Chicago Blues Poem (I'm going to Chicago)

I'm going to Chicago
     make no mistake about that,
Just got into Montreal
     but I'm leaving again real fast,
If there's one thing I can't wait to see
     it's the faces of Chicago women looking at me.

There's a lot of people talking about Niagara Falls
     they say this bus should go that way,
Man they got balls.
They just don't understand at all,
     Chicago's the way for us all.

Now I ain't no Jack Kerouac,
     I ain't no James Dean.
Yet if you cross my path
     I'll look at you real mean.

If there's one thing I do look like,
     it's a man with Chicago on his mind.

~ Nov. 1, 1974

I bud with the maple tree
     in Spring.

For as insignificant as we seem,
     come summer,
     we shall grow, and develop...
     make manifest our promise

Come first frost
     our colors will change
     and beauteous become our pigmentation,
     as experience will become this adult body
     into which I've settled.

So as our days are spent,
     whether as bud or as autumn leaf,
     we bring our ideas to fruition.

And despite the promise of this Spring,
     I regret
     that all I have now
     is this bud
     on a maple tree that needs pruning,
     in a yard someone else landscaped.

~ In the 1980s