Sensitivity

May 4, 1959

for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959,

recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959

Six weeks since that whisper rose

into the window of a stage

behind the Half Note's bar,

whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise,

Lester Young is dead, six weeks

since he fell from the sky,

dead off the plane from Paris,

and each night this goodbye's

gone more sensitive. Now

the flats are hid, and Handy's learned

to fold the sound of breath

inside his notes—the bleeding throat,

tongue's last epileptic flutter—

while Mingus thrills the bass

in waves of sound and fail

no microphone can hold.

Drinks tremble like the river

halfway from here to the grave,

pulled by wind or plummet,

cough of strings beneath the hand,

and uptown a tape is waiting

for magnets to say this again,

a teletype is writing a story

for tomorrow's Times—

a body pulled from a river

in Mississippi, with only fingers

for a name. Here

only the drinks are listening

as Ervin rises, ghosting Handy's lead,

and even they cannot hear

how the rivers heal their quiet,

how they fill their scars so perfectly

that remember feels like forget.

Then the breath is gone.

The wood hums a moment longer,

and each surface smoothes

till the glasses and the waters

are glass again and ready

to catch each clap,

each note that falls.

Source: Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010)