INTO THE STILLNESS
Into the stillness
of perpetual riffs
a quartet of jazz
cannot mute
the wolf down winds
carrying with them
our own expectations,
we live to rise again
on warm sheet music
in the roadside morning
when Coltrane
in a needle of informality
rolled out
of his conversation bed
to cover us over with
his fine fingered exercises
as a hopping love maker
of marvelous sounds,
here on a vagrant night
playing us
to remember
even those baby chords,
as his floating notes
here at the Golden Dome
reached the sky light
like pleats of gold dust
scratching the surface
of a moon landing,
and I felt him
removing all heartache
of unwavering loneliness
in those augmented scales
opening up my busy eyes
from big stretches
of urban dizziness,
he touched a shared nerve
in a body of oblivion,
when a melody in cadenzas
poured out
like shorthand poetry
which lead me
to a dada solo,
feeling his hip arpeggios
will never be lost
or missing in action
from every city’s
rough combat zone
when his cool musical air
blew me away
over unknown chords
in a fusion of four hands
twisting all girl-shadows
to haunt this boy forever
which transformed
his own verse vernacular
into painted monochromes
of the lost Beat
who wandered in the club
to find his own voice
in a clairvoyance
of half- speech,
scratching out
a carnivorous living
on low ball nights
by playing piano
of being quartered here
by resurrected words
writing itself
from leafy lips,
not wanting the high life
uptown where the blues
make each cupful
of sorrow more terrifying
in long advertisements
with a warning label
on each free bottle,
“Man,your life may
be on the edge
of losing it all
if we don’t listen
to what Coltrane is saying,”
thinking I will wind up
all alone
on the last street car
for moonstruck hours
railing at the bit
to renew my improvisation,”
yet how subtle is Coltrane
shifting his tempo
in a pastel mood swing
of untangled immersion
in the liquid quiet
between riffs
of making us
constantly feel alive
from his recorded times
opens our body cadences
when even silence
rests its voice
on creative absences
of recollected variations
for a house narrative
with even a chance
to survive the unknown
hypnosis of language,
not to be lost
in shadowy breaths
of a sexy sax
but to translate words
into music
on countless hours
into the stillness
of loss and love.