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CHAPTER 1

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
  or 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 bloodSucker.
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, bloodred 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.

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Excerpted from "Testimony"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Yusef Komunyakaa.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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