K

1960

In the old joke,
the marriage counselor
tells the couple who never talks anymore
to go to a jazz club because at a jazz club
everyone talks during the bass solo.

But of course, no one starts talking
just because of a bass solo
or any other solo for that matter.

The quieter bass solo just reveals
the people in the club
who have been talking all along,
the same ones you can hear
on some well-known recordings.

Bill Evans, for example,
who is opening a new door into the piano
while some guy chats up his date
at one of the little tables in the back.

I have listened to that album
so many times I can anticipate the moment
of his drunken laugh
as if it were a strange note in the tune.

And so, anonymous man,
you have become part of my listening,
your romance a romance lost in the past

and a reminder somehow
that each member of that trio has died since then
and maybe so have you and, sadly, maybe she.

Ode to Scars

The scars on others’ faces draw me to them.

I wear none significant on my face

though an eight-inch one on my chest

is still a welt where it was opened

and closed four decades ago.

A student in my office once: small white quarter moon

on her lower right cheek.

In the institutional light

it was a pearl in three-quarter eclipse.

Praise her scar: for she earned it.

Praise the man whose forehead fell on his shovel

before he finished digging his own grave.

They shot him, thinking

it was deep enough. It wasn’t. The shovel

led to the murderers, who hanged.

Praise the scar there unrisen.

Praise the lug-nut slingshot scar

my uncle wore on his forehead: it allowed

him many stories and, somehow, lumbago.

Praise the scar like little railroad tracks

up the back of one friend’s head,

and whatever minute scars—on the child,

her mother, and my friend—the surgeons left

when they worked to bring my friends’ child to the world.

Praise all scars, which, by definition, reveal

that something, one thing, one

thing minimum,

is healed.

Thomas Lux

 

 

 

😂