Felino A. Soriano's Tribute to Miles Davis

This March Felino A. Soriano began a new series, "Of this Momentum Song."  The poem below is forty-second in the series, and he has written it especially for The Song Is... and the contest honoring musicians born in the 1920s.  Enjoy!  I especially like how Felino conveys the physical act of playing music and the centrality of rhythm.

Of this Momentum Song (forty-two)

                           _______________

                           Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

                             —Miles Davis                       

    To be near ________,

      is what

   here needs it

      to be, an unnamed

    name is only

       ________ when

                  the

mouth closes, excavating

  rhythm in all

 language, when

   then here is again

 and why we ________

  is

   answered atop

 a silence of small

    stone: the flecks

  within the reflect

     hold the hand

   of what watches,

       how or when

                  the

 breath of our going,

  _________.  We come

to drink of/from.  The

   promise held to

 how we name the

    unnamed.  Paused

  intuition, we’ve a

     nuance in our

 motivated ________,

                 a

  freeing fathom can

 reinvent the mouth.

______________________

   Tongue: blurred wing

  song of clapping

     hands.  Hands:

                 speaking

  bilingual caliber, ________

   what we need

to invent, unaltered.

    Organized, we hour by

   the sound of it, sound-

     ing out to open

                   doors

   in incremental minutes.

  Certain these angles

    plagiarize shape,

                   _______

 is familiar,

      

       is

  known then replaced

 into what finds

           a self-outside

   the self, privileged,

                                 ________

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you would like to read other poems in "Of this Momentum Song," see this link:  http://www.felinoasoriano.info/published-poems-2006-to-2016.html

Let's start with something from Milestones.  The first link is to the title cut, and the second is to "Dr. Jackle."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94zDsJ-JMU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHk9Cgqa3yI

Here is his "All Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIfdYs8WErM

I want to play two from Miles in the Sky, the album my husband was playing this morning.  The first is "Black Comedy":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPIb47YXEv8  The second is "Country Son": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws7_krJ8SBQ

I'll finish with a live version of his "Portia," a later composition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vALF7BkM-k