There's grit in the road, and pumice,
and grease in which too many stale fish
have been fried. There are twists of breadcrust
with flourishing settlements of gray-blue
and iridescent green, and there's a wedding
band a hurt woman flung from a taxi window.
There's lonliness richer than topsoil
in Iowa, and there are swales and hollows
of boredom that go by as if trundled
by stagehands, unloved and worse,
unnoticed. Scenery, we call it, and land-
scape, when boredom is on us like a caul.
The bells of cats dead so long their names
have been forgot are bulldozed into the road,
and tendrils of rusting chrome and flecks
of car paint with ambitious names --
British Racing Green and Claret.
Cinders and tar and sweat and tax hikes
and long-term bonds. Like a village
at the base of an active volcano
the road is built of its history.
It's we who forget, who erred and swerved
and wandered and drove back and forth
and seemed aimless as teenagers,
though one of us steered the whole time.
The way it happened, see, we palyed in Dallas,
the state fair, for some black dance. Cat with a beautiful
white suit, Palm Beach maybe, dancing his ass
off. You look up from the charts, you see that white suit
like a banner in the center of the floor. Next thing
you know ther's a big circle of people moving
back, the way you throw a rock in water and it broadcasts
rings and rings, moving back. You travel
and you travel, some things you don't forget.
Two cats in the center, one of them the cat in white
suit and suddenly the suit was soaked-through red.
Coleman Hawkins used to say he'd been born
on a ship, in no country at all, though I think
he said it to remind himself how torn he felt
between being American at heart and the way
Europeans treated black musicians. This life,
it's easy to feel you've been born on the road.
You know the fine coat of dust furniture grows
just standing there? We grow it traveling.
We're on the road and the road's on us.
I used to ask myself each morning where I was
but slowly learned to know
-- and this is how
you tell a man who's traveled some and paid
attention -- by looking at the sky. A sky's
a fingerprint. All along the road the food's
the same and no two beds you hang your toes
over the end of are. That's when you've got
a bed. Some nights we just pulled the bus
off the road like a docked boat. After some towns
there'd be a scatter of spent condoms
where we'd parked, the way in a different life
you throw coins in a fountain, to come back
or not, whichever seemed the better luck.
I loved her earlobes and her niblet toes
and how the crook of her elbow smelled.
I loved one of her fingers most but a new
one every day. I loved how at the onset
of desire her eyes would go a little milky
the way water does just before the surface
of it shimmers when it starts to boil.
Telling how much I loved her made me talk
as well as I can play. One time she told me
what Dame Nellie Melba said: There's only
two things I like stiff, and one of them is Jell-o.
Then she let loose a laugh like a dropped
drawer of silverware. Here's what I said:
I love every juice a tuft and muscle
of you, honey, each nub and bog and fen,
each prospect and each view. That's what
I like to say I said, though where'd I learn
to talk like that? Same placce I learned to play.
You know how people always ask each other
How you feel? You learn to look straight
at the answer without flinching, then spend
ten years to learn your instrument.
Good luck helps, too. Of course somewhere along
that line I let my sweetie slip away. Truth is,
that was my choice. But I was with her
when I learned how some things can't be fully
felt until they're said. Including this salute.
You shuffle into some dingebox and there's
an audience of six, three of them sober.
The chill fire of its name in neon bathes
the windows. In the mist outside, the stoplights
are hazy and big, like lazy memories of pleasure,
and as they change in their languorous sequence,
going green and going downtown, an explanation
beckons, but of what? Too late, it's gone. No use
in staring moodily out the window.
Whatever it is, it will be back. Tires slur
on the rainy pavement outside. You've never
looked into a mirror to watch the next thing
you do, but it would identify you to yourself
faster than anything you know. You can remember it,
and in advance, with a sure and casual
rapacity. You duck your left shoulder a little
and sweep your tongue in a slight crescent
first under your top lip, then over the bottom.
You lay a thin slather on the reed and take
on a few bars of breath. Emily Dickinson
wrote of Judge Otis Phillips Lord that Abstinence
from Melody was what made him die.
Music's only secret is silence. It's time
to play, time to tell whatever you know.
(1970) William Matthews