ON HEARING JOHN HANDY PLAY JAZZ
AFTER MIDNIGHT, NEW YEAR'S EVE
—for Alistair Ingram
I don't practice. If I don't have it by
now, it's too late.
It's like going out with a different woman every night.
—Stan Getz
Feeling blue because my man left for no good
reason,
I crawl out of the hills to hear John Handy play
jazz solo.
In my head I write poems without words, pen or
paper
to every riff, growl and squeeze of his
saxophone.
The music pours into me, fingers of rain on the
sea.
We are shipwrecked in a blue room seductive with
smoke.
Embouchure and altissimo—open octaves form a
river
of birds spiraling home to the nascent shell of
our ears.
On the ceiling balloons undulate, bull kelp in
the waves.
John Handy brings me a purple one—the color of
sorrow.
He says, I got a cabin up in Cazadero. You
know Clive Hawthorne?
I say, I'm the bearer of bad news. He's two
years dead. Alcohol.
He flinches. Puts his hand over his heart. Says,
He was a good man.
We started out together in this business a
long time ago.
He points to my name-tag and asks where I've
been.
I say, measuring a passage of time on the other
side of the world,
celebrating New Year's Eve in Moscow with
Gorbachev via satellite T.V.
John Handy flutter-tongues and bends a few cool
notes—
a sweet school of fish ah-uhm for Charlie Mingus
and Auld Lang Syne.
Sequinned women in stiletto heels sway, charmed
snakes
in front of the mellifluous sax. Sub-tones.
Overtones.
Circular breathing. I tell him his music is
poetry without words.
Perfect intonation. Harmonics. When you hear one
note,
you hear every single note in the
universe.
He asks for my name-tag as a souvenir, puts it
into his pocket.
It says what I am—Poet. For a moment I'd almost forgotten
why I was alone.
1/1/89
Café Resalles, San Francisco
