Jazz & Kerouac
by Jenna Butler
[ poetry - march 05 ]
Jazz
The sound of a city
jumped up on oil money,
tail end of the Boom;
the eighties reeking of
leather and naugahide,
self-important bloom of
Capitalism in love with
its own reflection.
In Toronto, my mother watched
her family scatter over
two continents, an ocean;
waited, as one accustomed,
for her father’s death, for
her husband’s summons.
This music permeates
twenty years. The winters grew
ragged, the searing air that
wrapped the houses carried
the scent of woodsmoke. Blue guitar
underwrote the evenings. Older,
returning from bars in dim, grey hours,
a soft sax riff would thrill the street;
we crept to bed pursued by music;
the fleeting harmony.
Perhaps this is why my fingers stumble;
they’ve learned the keys,
which cadence calls on sudden joy,
arpeggiated crests; the falls
of light and mood this music brings.
But more than that - the rhythm holds
a rich, dark frame; chords weave
and cling. The sound of loss,
of bearings gained
reluctantly; above the buckle,
toss of time, its scope
the heart’s estranged melody.
Kerouac
his family heaved a sigh of relief
the day he hopped a train
and disappeared from their lives
(at least until the following Christmas)
under the trees in the woodlot
his meditation place grew over
threaded with wild blue flax
they mowed it under in September for hay
never a postcard
although once a slip of paper
with lines from Han Shen
which his mother pretended to understand
justifying its place on the mantel
out in the Arizona night
home was a thousand acres of desert sand
shot through with shadows
the Mexicali girls
brought port
and danced unafraid by the tracks
woke to his absence
and the dawn cinders of the Express
watched the slow sunlight
enter the imprint of his body
and obliterate his passing
