Most Faithful Companion
What keeps me hanging on, I must confess, are those exotic time signatures and counterpoint rhythms of Dave Brubeck. Heck, he’s all it takes to shake a day’s worth of doldrums. And Joe
Morrello on his drums, Desmond on his alto sax, Wright on his bass. Blue Rondo a la Turk to lift me up out of the dirt. For a while, the world’s alright.
With Brubeck, I collect myself, enter the desert without disturbing one grain of sand, ease myself into the space where I no longer need to understand. Counterpoint rhythms through autumn
nights drowning out crying babies, slamming doors, speeding cars. planes’ roars. If we have ears to hear exotic time signatures, we can escape into chords soothing as foghorns by the Golden Gate,
rousing as Pier 39’s sea lions. Music to assuage my grief, Take Five leading me back to that brief time when dreams kept me alive while screams echoing all around me threatened to deafen me.
Strange Meadow Lark reminding me there’s no such thing as closure – we languish perpetually at the aperture. Between chords, I sip Orvietto, give thanks I’ve nowhere to go save into jazz – most faithful companion, after all.
Quicksilver Guitar Licks
Thus I have heard.*
Remember when breezin’ was our second nature – our reason to move, when Benson’s quicksilver guitar licks landed like swift kicks
on our consciousness, could cure all that ailed us, were the only affirmation we needed that our nation wasn’t going to the dogs?
1976, George’s soulful vocal of This Masquerade enough to save us from despair, topping three charts – first (only?) song in music history
to do so: jazz, pop, R&B. What revelry to sit in the dark and sip rhythms and memories, to feel oneself poised on the portal between the living and immortal,
to sense it in one’s bones – if man can make such music, there is hope yet for humanity. Hungry and weary, my soul is one with the music. Moving to the rhythms,
my body is one with the muse. In the space in which the notes float, I awaken. Outside, high in the sky, Beaver Moon is filling out.
Inside, the music leads my mind into an empty, luminous space where the torrent of thoughts is easing. Breezin’ once our second nature, now
. . . for everything we are out of tune,** surely in a worse state than when William penned we lay waste our powers by all our getting and spending.
I feel breathless, even a tad restless Between Breezin’ and This Masquerade. If we have ears to hear and can cease our senseless chatter to listen to rhythms
and notes that matter – in dimming November, branches glimmering with clinging mist, trees baring themselves to Beaver Moon – we can awaken to Benson’s quicksilver guitar licks.
*traditional opening for Buddhist sutras in the Pali canon **William Wordsworth, from ‘The World is Too Much with Us’
Red Moon
Bathed in the light of the Red Moon, the night too hot – late summer Arabian Desert, I lie alone, recalling Earth’s ice ages, listening to traces of sand grains sifting through cracks in the door frame.
Hottest summer on record, they say. I play a jazz CD to distract me from not only the lack of rain and stifling heat, but also all the ominous events – the evidence of escalating climate change across the globe – the earth quaking, raging with wildfires, roiling with flood waters.
With the music of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to sustain, I steal away, begin to feel luxuriantly joyful, the full moon rising through air thick with the mucky stench of oil and gas, and the scenty pluck of bougainvillea – like the sweetest alleluia. For a while the weight of the cumbered world sloughs off my slumped shoulders.
Though vulnerable and lacking some of my former oomph, I rise up ecstatic, beginning to feel hopeful once again till I too whisper
alleluia.
Diana Woodcock has authored seven chapbooks and six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot, winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award. Holy Sparks was a 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist, and Facing Aridity was a 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist. Recipient of the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, she teaches at VCUarts Qatar.