"As with Lester Young’s tenor and Shakespeare’s sonnets, we measure each autumn against an exalted standard acquired early." – Patrick Kurp
Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, David Murray, James Carter…
It’s all the same damn tenor, renewed another spring.
Those sonnets they call Shakespeare, ever distant, ever perfect,
Bloom at last as lessons to his son, to whom he is anonymous,
As he is to us, in the meshes of a queen.
Another autumn
Where the past has more of me than it ever has before
And the future is a language I have still to learn.
Does one have more at death or when one’s born?
Or is it all the same, for all the negotiations in between
With a world that changes easier than do we?
Why must we get away from the perfect
After we first catch sight of it: the golden tree,
The flowing reed, the words that fill the emptiest of hearts?
How can we endure the experience again
In a lesser ecstasy? All the autumns I have known
I feel in one lone shudder of the wind—
What magic I’m allowed comes from beyond
What I can see, some receptacle for feeling
Finds its way, through all that’s turned in time
From phantom into stone.
You’re free until you see
The scrapbooks of your parents browned by time
That showed a life that somehow, somewhere else, still is real.
How I wish this thing would rhyme, in pleasant measured meters,
That the afflicted saxophone could make the dry and woody tone
My parents loved, or that the sonnets could remain a mystery for all,
Not mere biography, however stronger they become for being human.
For I remember every face that ever looked right back on me
As I spoke for the first time of a sublime– how much softer
The leaves should be, more knowing of the winter.
Instead
My arms are pulled in marching by the children I’ve looked after,
Smiling that I'm with them in this phalanx of emotion,
Common purpose, the perfection that remains inside ideals.
There’s only the sublime ahead, the hideous in knots
That must be something else, and shall be turned by thought
Into the thing that wraps us up, regardless of whether the mind
Believes it will or not.
