Geoff Page: Jazz Poems

Two Jazz Poems

I.   I think about

I think about the hours of practice,

those monkish solitudes,

that climbing sort of prayer,

and how, in time, their notes and scales

will live within the fingers.

I think about the clapboard churches,

the black sweat on a preacher’s brow,

the shouts of flattened fifths and sevenths.

I know too there are colder spaces,

indifferent galaxies that wheel.

I’m told that, given long enough,

we all rejoin the stars.

Theology is music almost.

It has the same abstraction

and atheism is no less

a cosmic diagnosis.

Saxophonists, like us agnostics,

choose one phrase, refuse another,

deferring certainty while knowing

all the while they must and will

fall free from what we’ve known as physics.

2.   So long I’ve listened

So long I’ve listened with the ears

in darkness, self-imposed or real,

celebrating sound alone—

even where the music’s live

and truly evanescent.

Today these re-born YouTube clips

are something else again.

I hear the shine of perspiration.

I see the heroes, paunched or thinned,

still working in their final years.

Each cut is flickering with history,

at times just hokum cameos

from movies long forgotten.

More commonly it’s footage

shot by sleepless devotees

who know that what they’ve stored away

will one day count, that sound alone

will never be enough

although it is … almost.

These days we need the sweat as well.

The smells, of course (those carpets damp

with Budweiser, the Craven A,

that ’fifties whiff of Chanel 5)

are truly gone forever.

Geoff Page