Blue Logic

To start off this project, I am posting Ed Schelb's "Blue Logic."  Ed is a friend of the family (me, my husband, and the cats) who first worked with my husband at Purdue in the 1990s.  Yes, yes, yes, Miles Davis is older than Ron Carter, but I think that it's more important to publish this poem and show what can be done with the music for inspiration.  Enjoy!  I hope that Ed's poem and the links below inspire you!

BLUE LOGIC

“Don't play what's there,play what's not there.”—Miles Davis

I listen to the spiny clusters

of sound trying

to break free as Miles

revolves around

a single note, exhausting

its capacity to move.

José calls discord color—

sulfurous yellow of exhaust,

blue of corpses!

Play that trumpet long enough

and the air sheds its color

and fades to a snakeskin pallor.

Blue trees, blue dirt,

branches tangled

and drenched in rapturous blue

to teach us the uselessness

of a winter sky.

An afternoon of fighting

over the car stereo

until I give in and play

sugarwater—Zucchero with his jazz

soft as a bruised pear—

after you swat Mingus

when the gospel

begins to buzz. Nightfall

and I still can’t remember

the names of the tunes

on Kind of Blue even after turning

on the dome light

and pouring over liner notes

as if consulting

a geological survey by flashlight.

A hearse passes by in the snow.

I go inside and read over

notes on gulls for an essay

I’ll never write—

kittiwake wings dipped

in Chinese ink, ideograms

of thievery, salt and pepper

shells for camouflage,

souls of drowned sailors.

I note the word gull comes

from seacoast-tongues,

goelaff, to weep,

with an entire lexicon

of emotion built

on bird-names, traces

of bird tracks or skeletal

nubs, bones warped to fit

a new territory.

Like a gull’s breast disappearing

into pale sky to compensate

for its inability to swim,

you may arrive at a blue logic,

blue copulas in the space

between colorless verbs.

Blue does not  waver.

Instead its identity congeals,

so that I can tolerate blue

only when softened

by white scumbled surfaces,

light filtered through worms’ nests

in mimosa trees,

virginal snow etched

with deer tracks.

Listen to Evans’ progressions

undulate like splintered ice

at the lake’s edge,

Coltrane’s gull-frenzy

as the sound searches

for scatterings of food.

At work I sneak looks

at Okada’s broken blue

circles where the action

takes place along the edges,

on the margins of color

where waterweeds

bloom. A space

of escaped birds—

a cormorant’s dive

leaving ripples,

a mallard’s descent

scarring the bright surface

with the silence

of his blue circles curling

tight as pine cones,

blues that contain traces

of goldenrod,

brush strokes left by bees,

a blue of shadows tilting

like an empty house.

I wait for surfaces

to freeze over so I can test

their thickness and listen

for cracks. I keep Okada’s fish-eye

perfections hidden deep.

Battery dead,

with just enough juice

to threaten to turn over.

Snowplows push the ice

like dung beetles.

Listen closely and you can

hear bicycles tremble

like dying bees.

I admire the plants

left out to freeze,

chrysanthemum skeletons

soft as paper. Chris refuses

to wear anything

but flamingo sneakers

whose soles leave the imprint

of a fish. Bright scales,

not the thick smoothness

of catfish or sleek

trout stipple-belly.

More like blue gill

or crappie multiplied

in snow banks, frozen scraps

of a love-feast.

I rub a few words in my hands

to gauge their degree

of ice and dust and drift.

I wander in and out

of books and daylight and songs

whose structure reminds me

of the curve of skeletons

and plants, of territorial gulls

burying the carcasses of rivals

into their own nests,

like inserting quotes from old

funeral marches

into a slowly decaying jazz tune.

The afternoon has turned

colder, with eyes

split open like figs,

with hands that imitate

dying trees,

with the daylight music

that swells like fish nets

dragged into harbors.

Maple leaves streaked

with gold tumble

like Duchamp’s nude

on her staircase,

flesh-tones

more Byzantine

than flashbulb yellow

even in the dark,

hard-edged, all joints

and cysts and cylinders.

I once knew that angels

were birds, then anything

that took flight.

Seeds, spiders, pollen, gnats,

the dust that flew at harvest time.

Now birds spark

and driftwhirl coldly,

onslaughts of birdstrike

screech designed

for attack and flight

and deception

that you hear only

in the tidal cut,

lapwing cries to lure you

away from the truth.

Kandinsky saw blue

as a snail retreating

into its shell, drawing away

from the spectator,

turning in upon its own

center, withdrawing.

I stay closer to home:

blue-light specials.

Food stamps jamming

the registers.

All the aisle-lights

flashing like traffic signals

in a rain squall,

blip, blip, blip.

The cashiers handle

cereal boxes

like dead mice.

Outside the coffeehouse

piles of dirty snow bulge

like the muscles of Ruben’s horses.

Horses of suet

and snowdrift melted into

Baroque slagheaps.

I listen to the Birth of the Cool

as snowflakes fall

and Max  Roach’s drums

swarm and bite

and ignorant trombones

clash by night.

The chords become

muddy watering holes

where wild horses stop to drink.

Horses everywhere!

The ground looks trampled

as if by hooves.

The music lingers.

Bird’s moniker

was no coincidence.

Chickadee, Cherokee,

kiskadee, with the vowels

closing like a sudden

going away, infinite variations

upon a theme of evasion.

Marshtones, wheatstalk,

flycatchter tumble— 

shapes always deceive.

Even birds of prey know

their boundaries, the laws

of field-rustle and blue

wing-shadow

that cannot be broken.

The cormorant fears

the gull’s eye,

and natural law reveals

itself through victims

—pigbones, mussel shells,

the skulls of wild swans—

while victims

speak of liberty

as the absence of all restraint,

as if a predatory gull

would see freedom as

stealing broken eggs

and strands of broken nests.

At dusk I listen

to the territorial disputes

of crows, their voices

distinct—the lesser

voice brittle as bamboo,

the other deep-throated

and rough—until lovers

in the park begin

to shout goodbye

and the firecrackers start.

I watch the starlings gather

in the mulberry branches

and try to coax them

into my guitar,

and your voice is still dark

when you call.

The moon still hides

behind the light it refuses,

and even the words

that betray sleep

are soft as dove-breast,

soft as the quiet delirium

of empty spaces.

The windows fog and the world

turns blue, the captive blue

of car radios late at night,

the blue of antelopes

who listen for the night-

rustle, inextricable

from the rich scent

of the dark. As we kiss

I dream  of drawing forth

a touch of that blue,

like lips grazing

a harmonica,

like orbits of planets

shimmering

like lake water retreating

into itself like God’s

withdrawal at the creation

of the world,

a blue that exists

only in the feathers

of birds, imaginary birds

whose wings are estuaries,

whose eyes are full of rain

and thickening roots.

Nothing left to do

but search for my passport

and my dancing shoes.

And here are some links to Miles' music for you.  Some of the songs are from the albums that Ed mentions; others are from later ones, including some that my teacher Reuben Jackson introduced me to in a lecture he gave several years ago at the Writer's Center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIiD__29-f8 (The entire Kind of Blue)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGvfBNywa3g   (A video of "So What" with period commentary)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFuHKvEuFbU ("All Blues," a song that was later covered by Ron Carter and others)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8kjOpfMBbM  (The entire Birth of the Cool)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kSmLTmS1xI&list=PL65E703764E7E6C33&index=2 ("Concerto de Aranjuez (Adagio)" from Sketches of Spain)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7cYMj8WSPY (The entire Filles de Kilimanjaro from 1968)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cydDdc6mnM  (The entire Jack Johnson from 1971)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps0ka1tY5yg&list=PLA0077F372BB485C8  (On The Corner from 1972)

The photograph above is of Miles Davis in 1955, relatively early on in his career.  Perhaps I should also include a link to his biography.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/miles-davis/biography

And, finally, here is a link to my call for poems!!

http://thesongis.blogspot.com/2014/06/lively-up-blog.html