Baltimore, forty years ago -- West Fayette, a corner bar and my quintet: piano, tenor, trumpet, bass, drums. I parked down the street, beside a churchyard, an iron fence, a tipped stone, and Poe's grave. Every night I greeted him, and in five hours said good night to the bones, the shadows, the low, searching trees. The jazz went unrecorded, and the man with the big forehead and baggy eyes was long since chewed to nothing; yet I said good night, and in my brain my music swirled companionably with the cicadas fiddling in the shadows. Cold sober, I might have seen a ghost fenced in the humid summer night, but here was only the woven mix of images, the holy noise of what I believed was poetry -- the shadows, the leaves, the tipped stone, the empty vase, my own steps, the car door, and what seemed almost there, another fine morning. |