Richard Stevenson

 

Calypso Frelimo
from Get Up With It (1974)

Your trumpet a squalling newborn now --
like the country that would be --
the country that would live up to
the promise of its fallen foot soldiers --
a raw pain bugled and brayed
through miles of tempered steel.

Not the calypso that survived
The Middle Passage of whips and cane,
but throttled, strangled metallic notes
that would turn the blues purple
set against the soft carnival sound
of a repeated organ riff of lost innocence.

A new blues squeezed through
tubular steel and detonated with
three valve caps; more political
than any Marxist program of reform --
the flute a white bird sailing
over the lush jungle canopy
that swallows up its dead.

The percussion percolates its unction,
its urgent life line a steady tattoo
on the skins of more than the ungulate,
the cloven-hoofed who'd churn
all the green in bovine cheeks.
You wail an older language than Kalashnikovs;
a wondrous new beast suckles
at the dug of a milk-blue moon.

 

He Loved Him Madly
from Get Up With It (1974)

You might have been kneading
the notes of bread broken
at your own wake, Miles.
Such a slow, earnest noodling
at the keyboard ... such soft
ethereal blues musings threading
three guitarists' threnody
through the pale wash of blue.

You loved Duke madly, we knew;
thread so much of your self
through the lush jungle music
that was the backdrop of your youth.
How could we have got it so soon
after fusion's heavy, polyphonic debut?
The tune requires so much more love
and patience than a bitch's brew.

Yet we feel your sadness in the
small, tentative fingerings of the child
who sits at the keyboard here. You can't
bugle away this kind of pain like
some sloe-eyed deer caught in
the crosshairs of hubris and humility.
The flutes' butterfly can find no purchase
on anything but lilies or the sticky
blood made black in the plash of moonlight here.

 

'58 Miles

Of the '58 edition of your sextet
what is there to say? You blew
the doors off most -- if not all --
the small jazz groups out there.

Defined the era, some would say,
though I was only six, was
still doing the Romper Room bop.
Now I'm cruising in the convertible

I never owned. The sky is the
only carapace and the hood
is half a block long, not at all
like the fuel economy shit boxes

they call cars these days, for
all their technological advances.
You fire on six pistons and
eat up the highway the way

Wimpy ate burgers. The only
roll bar is an upturned collar
and the cigs I never smoked
are accoutrements of desire.

To listen to these tracks is
to travel with the rag top down
at any speed you choose
to music a push button away.

Bucket seats cup my fine vines
like the fine tapered fingers
of a gumshoe femme fatale
around a brandy snifter. I'm hip.

Love is for sale for the cost
of a burger and fries, and I
really get change back from my dollar.
Even the moon fits like a dime in the juke box!

I'm flyin' down Green Dolphin Street
boppin' with Stella by starlight.
I'm straight, need no chaser
but a cuppa joe. Am good to the last drop.

Gas seems thick and hard to
suck up the straw, even
in this gas guzzler. Friends with
pocket change keep the carburetor smilin'.

My funny valentine's got mohair
bumperettes like ICBM missile
cones of her own. Dead presidents
aren't greenbacks, but history notes.

Yet Coltrane blows sheets of sound.
How could we know he was cutting
steel with oxyacetylene? We are in a dream.
You could cut cheese on creases of your slacks.

The principal has a ruler to see
that Fran's skirt is only two inches
from the floor when she kneels. Jimmy Cobb
and Paul Chambers hold the road

like steel-belted radials before
there are radials. The moon is a bell
we can hit with a single swipe
of a carnival sledge. We win cupie dolls.

Margarine is oleomargarine -- Rollin's
"Oleo" of the last track - and has just
been invented, just as jazz is newly minted
under the pistons of your fine-tuned machine.

Does it get any better than Paul Chambers
hummin' along to the quick pluckin'
of his double bass, or the sweet
sound of your harmon mute, Miles?

When everything else has changed there's
still the Plaza club date of '58.
The only ceiling is the star-strewn dark.
Each note is a hula hoop around the moon!

 

How Deep Is The Ocean?
from Blue Note (Volume One) (1952)

Deep enough to drown in,
vast enough to carry you off
on waves of doubt and defeat.

Yet you hang on to the gunwales
of melody and play the
melancholy tune with all the pain

and knowledge of a syringe
slamming a whack of smack
into half-collapsed veins,

draw a sweetness like sap
through tubular steel, the
xylem and phloem of hope

until the tune grows leaves,
a chlorophyll halo about
your head. I want to say

you're back from the dead,
but only these pristine recordings
offer the hedge against death.

You're on the far shore
of loneliness now. That ethereal
tone carries you, a glass fishing float,

broken off some oriental fishing net
cast long ago in other waters
waits lodged in sand for a child's hand.

 

My Scars

Man. I've got scars
all over my body
except on my face.
My face is in good shape.

Every day I look at that face
and say, "You're a handsome
motherfucker, Miles!"
and laugh my ass off.

The ladies love my face.
My penetrating gaze,
my little boy quizzical brow
drives 'em all crazy.

And when they see the scars
they all want to hold me
like I were a crate of eggs,
protect me from the world.

But shit, those scars are like
badges to me, you know.
I love every fuckin' one of 'em
for the tales they tell.

They could cut off my dick
so I couldn't snake charm
any woman ever again,
cut off my freakin' arms --

I wouldn't care as long as I
could think and create some
other way. Dictate my memoirs
or fart through my horn.

Hell, I don't need no trumpet.
I don't need no embouchure.
I could paint and eat pussy
with the same pair of lips!

 

What I Say
from Live Evil (1970 )

Dum - dum - daahh
Dum - dum - daahh
Dum - dum - daahh

Miles sez and Jack bobs
to the buddy Miles groove,
layin' down the pattern --

a fat funky beat for Eddie --
young black dude late
of Aretha's and Stevie Wonder's

bands to groove to, sayin'
bump ba, bump ba, bump ba
back at 'em, layin' down

that funky stew for Miles
to groove to, swingin' high
in the funk jazz canopy

sayin' Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
Stabbin' out those high E's,
bat squeak frequencies

til he's got the whole
lush jungle thing happenin',
frogs, toucans, gibbons

all singin', all swingin'
for their dinner drivin'
forward on a fat ostinato

backbeat, leavin'
everything European
for the 'hood's back streets.

Crickets sawin' away
at the same sad sore
on bandy white knees,

not diggin' it,
not getting that Miles
ain't in no button down

bop groove and
ain't comin' back
while he leans back

on satin black haunches,
braces arms against
the bellows of his sides,

brays away in praise
of the new muse/
new blues; that wondrous beast

stridin', stridin' lean
into the hot summer's streets,
the new Jerusalem.