It is December and I am homeless in two cities a thousand miles apart
And on this date when I first opened my eyes to see what I was crying about
When I first began to stir all these sensations into a great muddle
When the round bodies of automobiles held the keys to every horizon
When only my mother's lullabies mattered
As my parents' faces slowly emerged out of the blur that is our glorious
beginning
And I grew to peek around corners
Not knowing one day I would chase my past down roads it never took
And 46 years later find my way to Memphis
Standing by the river whose broad current cuts through the continent
Who has carried cities of silt down to the Gulf
Who has clothed America in cotton
In whom raw dreams have kept afloat only to be banked at unlikely turns
And every day the highway leaps across the Mississippi
And every day I trample sacred ground
Where someone first tasted the sacrament of another's lips
Where someone stood waist deep in the moment
But I am a restless pedestrian pacing the upper deck of a riverboat peering at the
history of America
And I am nothing if not a gentrified vagabond, a collage of mixed metaphors, a
repository of insatiable desires, a body with only so many breaths left
And so I have rummaged through the remains of paradise
Beholding myth in the sweat of mortals
Seeing art when the sky was just doing its job
And the brown waters eddy beneath the bridges I cross and recross
And there is no rest though the sun slips off into Arkansas
Though the delta sleeps a few depleted hours
While the country grows fat off the memory of heroes it's martyred
And in this world of wet clay, rich humus, gambling barges, trailer homes built on
stilts by riverbanks south of Memphis
Under the humid stars, under the spell of flooded banks, wooden rafts, the
hushed wind, the migrations of millions
The river inexhaustibly outruns itself.
In a one room mansion, in a Middle Eastern metropolis, where all roads lead to
Heaven by way of the Central Bus Station, by way of unpicked blue
wildflowers and a turntable, pine-soaked paths and roasted flatbreads,
nightly forays into the midtown ice cream bins and conversations of four
people unloading their lives simultaneously with everyone listening at once as
a melody coalesced out of the singular syllables and each human instrument
improvised its share of motifs and so were born out of their own umbilical
cords, the jazzmen of God
The jazzmen of God who celebrate all traditions instinctively, affirm life by waking
up the whole neighborhood with the good news! of dawn and new moons and
every conceivable weather and season, whose bodies are their own
monuments, whose hands bless the sweat of your brow, my brow, and the
brows of the coming generations
And who, know-nothing and new born, bypass all divine bureaucracies on their
way up the scales of no-nonsense and harmony and occasional bossa nova
when the situation warrants it
The jazzmen of God who sing no-holds-barred blues because spring is spring
and trees love the weight of the greening branches as I love your weight on
mine and rhythm is the pulse at rest and the heart in the full-throttle immortality
of hours of breathless love
The jazzmen of God who offer tokens-of-nothing at face value, whose feet love
the taste of vintage grapes, whose hair loves any excuse for a breeze, whose
backs were made for the weight of the sky and as a mantel for the multijeweled
crown which is the human head
And in the unplowed valleys and outside the windows of kitchens where the
fruit-colored birds shuttle from shrine to shrine and trees take root in the
unsettled dust, the jazzmen of God redefine prayer as the scat call of the wild,
lonely, and gregarious souls that never overlook the magnificent architecture
of the sentient kingdom - always seeing the living God there - feisty,
recalcitrant and incarnate
No sound too subtle or small
No interval unloved
The jazzmen of God solo up and down the sidewalks and asphalt temples
conjuring hermits out of the hills and prophets out of their deserts,
honoring the miracle that is our daily breath.
It's a warm July night on the open bow of the Port Jefferson ferry churning
through the waters of the Sound from Bridgeport, the Long Island
coastline sprinkled with electricity
As the prow parts the sea
And these are the same waters once crossed by canoe, by raft, by skiff, by
schooner from ports of trade
The same rocky coast carved by glaciers
The same song of the waves and gulls and slap of sails, the bell of the mast at
night because there is wind, because there are ears listening in the dark
on their wooden porches, on their beds behind the open screened
windows as their loved ones breathe with the rhythms of sleep
And we dock 80 minutes later, ejecting automobiles into the humid night
But I will walk - on the docks of weathered planks and splinters, on the gravel,
the concrete, the blacktop, up the steep hills that gape back forever across
the Sound
Past the huddled two-story houses that accompany the street up the long ascent
from which natives looked through the thick trunked trees as Europe was
arriving with muskets and false promises
And I am walking in the tracks of someone else's ancestors
Humming a rock 'n' roll melody from the age of the transistor
Wearing a purple hand-stitched belt from the Incan Andes to hold up my black
Gap jeans
Eating a swirled frozen yogurt
And the cow was brought on the ocean-crossing vessels of milk-fed Europe
And the cone is one part southern cane
And the rough napkins from their black dispensers were once rooted in the dark
soil amid the compost of dead leaves
And we are the children whose names drowned in the passage across the
Atlantic
Or who camouflaged our God in the God of he who lashed the whip
Or whose laugh was turned back at the border to return to the land of the vanilla
bean and cocoa plant
And in our sneakers and sandals and boots and loafers, we trample the buried
steps of the natives of the aboriginal night.
