From Tens

XXIII

Music is all about scheduling
The calendar a universal instrument
With 365 keys
Times a hundred years of solitude
Which is practice
You practice every time you play
The need for subs is satisfied
By the community at large
Someone will jump at the chance
The energy flows through gateless barriers

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

“You practice every time you play on your instrument,” Thelonious Monk in documentary film Straight No Chaser, directed by Charlotte Zwerin (1988)

Wumen Huikai, The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan) (1228), translated by Robert Aitkin (1991)

XXIV

The lights go out
All over town
A shadow moves
Across a face
A noir moment
On a blank page
What will you give me
For this marvelous art?
Do I hear money?
Or only see the stars?




XXV

Stars in winter
Palpable shine
To forget is a blessing
Leaves the soul free
Like an exchange student in Bosnia
Doing shots in a club
An end to specificity
A crystal set
Far out to sea
Traffic in sound




XXVI

Wild wicked wind
Blows trees around without
Lifting them off the ground
Sleeping bag flops across Lakeshore
All types of people
What were their names
The wind picks them up
Puts them down someplace different
Sweeps plum blossoms off patio
Into piles like snowdrifts

“What were their names?” Woody Guthrie, song, “The Sinking of the Reuben James” (1942)




XXVII

Time for a smoke
A non-filter stashed away
A step away from them
The social group of choice
Hop on a bike
Head for the hills
Off-road green and rolling hills
That repeat along a coastline
The return is all uphill
And really not necessary

Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them,” Lunch Poems (1964)




XXVIII

Rather than think, I think therefore I am
Why not think in terms of a community of others?
I is another and so is you
We reverberate in a group orchestration of otherness
That sounds like something else
Including plants, animals, rivers and mountains
Languages, regions, nights, and days
The stars my destination
Is another way to put it
At home in the cosmos

Rene Descartes, “ego cogito, ergo sum,” Principles of Philosophy (1644)

John Ashbery, “Rivers and Mountains,” Rivers and Mountains (1962)

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1957)




XXIX

Seize on these moments (lying in wait)
And throw them away
The life you lived is over now
That bird has flown
Shelves of books of accretive sensitivity
Porous pages of paper marking time
Off you go
You or I or they or we
Making of air our permanent home
Unpacking a life like no other

John Lennon & Paul McCartney, song, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” Rubber Soul (1965)




XXX

Place the street battered by wind and rain
Two or three more lines fall back to sleep
The air is unrecognizable
We lean on each other to death
Pillow talk of the stars
The hand is shaky, the head on straight
Multitudinous billows inflate
Where did you get those eyes?
The better to see you with
Sometime before the break of day

“Where’d you get those eyes?” Johnny Mercer & Harry Warren, “Jeepers Creepers” from the film Going Places (1938)

“The better to see you with,” Little Red Riding Hood, European folk tale