Explore Poems: Music

ornette ornette
Go listen to Ornette
Rambling Blessings
with Cherry Higgins Haden
O. D. C. B. holding church…

            Tell me about the good things
you clappin & laughin

Will you remember
or will you forget

Forget about…

Even the earth dies sometimes
            when it is most alive.
            Walter Bishop Jr. slaying the keys, 
Harold Vick…

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell…

She lip-syncs “Hello God,” then “9 to 5.”
She struts. Or does she fly? Like the soul,
a rhinestone, she tells us, will never die.
She’s a blush-pink Bible. Patched together,
she’s a cosmic doll. Mirror of a mirror,
she winks, her face the only...

Who named him Yard Bird?
He was a homing pigeon
With no home to fly to

Sky unlimited
Route uncharted
Eagle strong
He scorched his wings
Haunting the heavens
Buzzing the sun
As the feebler fowl
Looked up in awe
But played it safe

In the rambling sky
He lived!
Here he rendezvoused
With freedom
Flashing...

Her rum-brown rope of a voice
Fastens flannel strands
Around soft sides of staid notes
Sitting properly
On their oh so proper scale
She pulls
And the notes fall
Into her molten mold
Of flaming sound

I played a folk song once
                   so long into the night
                            it came apart.
           ...

notebook
divine love is so.
invisible.

notebook
november 1. all souls day. rimbaud-o. go
to hell. picasso knows. how he really fucking
knew knows. where can he go now.

notebook
picasso hoax: don’t nobody tell when he dies.
continue let time continue and move like myth.
till suddenly somebody rings...

in the darkness
in the exile—there is a sigh, a number 9
there is a son borne of the street song, the injured timpani red drum
there is a town,  Jihlava, a make-shift theatre &
rough-cut street dancers, there is a sky that welcomes...

Mommy always wanted
To be famous

She would have us (my sister and me)
Sing
In all the talent shows
But I could not carry the harmony
Then she had me
Sing
Alone
Though The Isley Brothers
Always won
Ronald’s sweet voice and Vernon
Doing “the Itch”
Sort of like Michael Jackson
Doing “the...

The night ZZ Hill sang at the Club Tupelo
on the Westside of Chicago
he was built like a heavyweight boxer in a tailored suit
             bathed in a soft blue
light like the only thing
to see in that darkened
space where bluespeople came
to turn...

I may take offense, may still your tongue
And your fickle ax willowing spastically
During unpredictable weather events. 
As sure as the influence of big Cat.4’s
Can be felt in hair, almost like a weighted 
Scent sinks itself deep into your lungs.

I believe your brain...

In other sounds
 E wants a mother
[unclear] I hear

bad. Trachea,
 trace—translate
[hiss] chase

meaning’s
 severed half-
lives for cantos.

Mine pine
 after dorsal
fins. Drafts

drown in
 throat. I’m
pssst tense

subjunctive
 unfolding
spine, needling

form’s tomb
 marrow sonata.
Tingly

E taunts bow
 fingers dawn
lightly butchers

an author
 botches cadence
mutters in violet.

Think of the fox skins belted to the backs of the dancers

at Santo Domingo Pueblo, a thousand fox skins leaping.

The first year I heard the bells around their waists.

The second year I heard the drum inside my belly.

The third year...

Apart, we are two quiet things:
a person and an instrument.
I in my body,
the clarinet in its case.

We are like good friends.
The clarinet takes nothing away from me.
It lets me borrow its notes.

If I loan it my breath,
I can speak with...

you begin with a sound wrapped around a syllable, or syllables,
a word (or words) like razzmatazz, or ratamacue, then you listen to
a red-boned black man playing a horn like a clue,
like a train or john coltrane or bird, then you...

1.
a carrier of incandescent dreams this
blade-thin shadowman stabbed by lightning
crystal silhouette
crawling over blues-stained pavements his life
lean he drapes himself his music across edges
his blood held tight within
staccato flights

clean as darkness & bright as lightning
reversed moments where the sound is two...

Facing the blackboard,
the teacher whistles
a melody of marbled tenderness.
Entanglement,
intrigue or spook?
Perhaps,
in retrospect,
Monday thoughts
of cared-for cashmere
or the end bite
of Sunday's sweet potato.
It simmers & simmers,
the music that learns us;
The Mamas & the Papas
Queen Latifah singing
"California Dreamin'."
The ear is nobody's fool.

I

When Ma Rainey
Comes to town,
Folks from anyplace
Miles aroun’,
From Cape Girardeau,
Poplar Bluff,
Flocks in to hear
Ma do her stuff;
Comes flivverin’ in,
Or ridin’ mules,
Or packed in trains,
Picknickin’ fools. . . .
That’s what it’s like,
Fo’ miles on down,
To New Orleans delta
An’ Mobile town,
When Ma...