Oh, Ammons rolled the octaves slow And the piano softened like butter in his hands, And underward Catlett caught the beat One sixteenth before the measure with a snip-snap touch on the snare And a feathery brush on the cymbal, and Shapiro Bowed the bass, half-glissing down past E-flat to A, to D, And after a while Berigan tested a limping figure low In the cornet's baritone and raised it a third and then another Until he was poised On the always falling fulcrum of the blues, And Bechet came in just as the phrase expired And doubled it and inverted it In a growl descending, the voice of the reed Almost protesting, then to be made explicit On the trombone as O'Brien took it And raised it again, while Berigan stroked a high tone Until it quavered and cried, And Carruth came achingly on, the clarinet's most pure High C-sharp, and he held it Over the turn of the twelfth measure And into the next verse with Bechet a fifth below rumbling Upward on the back beat powerfully, And O'Brien downward, And Catlett press-rolling the slow beat now, The old, old pattern of call and response unending, And they felt the stir of the animal's soul in the cave, And heard the animal's song, indefinable utterance, And saw A hot flowing of the eternal, many-colored, essential plasm As they leaned outward together, away from place, from time, In one only person, which was the blues. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE POPLAR FIELD by WILLIAM COWPER ODE INSCRIBED TO W.H. CHANNING by RALPH WALDO EMERSON THE BATTLE-CRY OF FREEDOM by GEORGE FREDERICK ROOT AMERICA by JAMES MONROE WHITFIELD ROUNDEL FOR THESE TIMES by ADELIA DOOLITTLE BAUER GOD by CATHERINE CATE COBLENTZ A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT'S STORM by WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES |