In Celebration of
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
—“mu” three hundred seventy-seventh part—
Come Thursday morning it was time to
move on. We wanted the image or the ré-
sumé of light without its monotony, to be
done
with not yet being done but not. It was
later for inland stillness for us. Coastal
gnosis had us and we it. No absence of
wave
or ripple spoke to us now, the road itself
bucked and tossed us, witnesses against
our own egress… The photons’ dance
was
our kalimba, as micro as we got and
that we got, did get, was the away of it, the
weft of an awayness ever on edge or at
edge,
an anansical stretch. The dilapidation of
matter was light’s launch according
to some. Who were we to say not, a poor
man’s
horn section at best? Dion from on Bel-
mont in The Bronx had said as much, ad-
mitting doo-wop’s roots in the orchestra pit
at the Apollo. Dion, short for Dionysus, and
his
Apollonian chorus caroling local civili-
ties burnt to the bone, taken tonalities an ac-
knowledgement of sorts… By such lights
we
were cultural exegetes now, the mean-
ing of the doing or the doing of the meaning
ours to figure out of late. Act was an en-
tablature of light we tiptoed under. Act was
ab-
sorbed or enforced or even both. But Dah-
jale, with her wasp waist and her fine self,
wasn’t feeling it. “Really?” she burst out, “Is
this
what we’re doing? Is this whatever the hell
we’re doing? We’re some kind of conscience
now we’re saying? We’re passing out deeds
to
the propertyless, to the dispossessed horns
of the pit?” But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t
exactly that. “It’s not,” Andreannette, with her
comely heft and her beautiful self, piped up,
“so
much that as that we’re amortizing the hol-
lowness of the horn. We batten on empti-
ness.” It was only a shade of difference, if that,
but
shade enough to bask in and be sexed inflec-
tion on the photons’ dance… What mattered was
we were on our way. It was all inference and
in-
sinuation, the itting of the it, as we who moved
on moved on beyond place or position, we who
inhab-
ited the hollow of the
horn
•
Dahjale spoke not only to us but for us,
hoping for love knowing love could only
do so much, the good greed reputedly was
and
other conundrums among the mysteries
Nub allied. We had long since been
on the city’s outskirts petitioning outlet, rid-
ing the whoosh that grew with it, Cajun
waltz
and otherwise, petitioning blood’s in-
cumbent rush… At the outmost it was all of
a certain rim knowledge, every waltz we
had
ever known, its incongruous drift. It all
congregated at the city’s edge as we
were leaving, moving on, moving on itself
mov-
ing on. Come Thursday morning it had
been time to go… We crossed our hearts
and said we would not lie. We crossed our
hearts having lied before, adamant never to
lie
again, honesty a thing now to be dealt
with, no longer prone to ideality and dream,
thrown
between piranhas and
pirates
•
“I don’t wanna be a hot knife cutting
thru butter,” the would-be trombone
Andreannette played was saying. “I
wan-
na be a hot plate melted on by but-
ter, if not butter itself.” We were well be-
yond the outskirts now, the receding
city
a bag of glitter left behind, backed up
against the mountains beside it… The
would-be alto Dahjale played spoke more
surface than line, so real the subterranean
agree-
ment she and Andreannette were in.
“Why butter?” the alto asked even so, an
implied, multifaceted voice airing hair
and
the smell of confinement, waltz’s long
pedigree… The certainty of covert hair
tucked away snugly it put us in mind of.
Ladyships holstered in silk let eventually
loose
and even let into it put us in mind of too,
an insinuation butter had to do with lubricity
lost
on no one, Dahjale’s
joke
____________________
Doo-wop was horn talk was all we were
saying and even that we said only in
passing, harbingers whose horns wooed
hea-
ven. Dahjale and Andreannette were
two heavenly beauties with no reason
to be given pause or pissed off, the anti-
phonal beauty of their exchange its own
breed
of heaven… Sheer bounty and sheer
beast bartered vocable and cornucopia, a
mystic surplus whose array proved astro-
nomical, a heaven the hollows of whose
horns
had hold of and held us… Dahjale was
doo to Andreannette’s wop, the two
of them distinct but related knots on the
orbital
rope circumscribing
the city
____________________
We were the band we’d be. We played
Grachan Moncur III’s “Frankenstein.” We
brought Shepp’s way of playing it a bit to
mind,
no way if not our own way though, we
could not lie… We precessed along
the circle of thirds, each one as if an equinox
we waltzed our way into, night and day’s
equi-
ty knots on a rope in a continuous rota-
tion… We were the band we’d be, the centri-
fugality of all the waltzes we knew rolled
into
one. Monstrous, we could not lie, the much-
maligned, much-applauded window of soul a
mere
slit
•
Huff had been wanting to say some-
thing for a while, something about
wobbly rotation, the relativizing
drift
of it all. So much for the City of
Less Time, cried the bittersweet
would-be alto he blew, nasal tonality
the avatar of truth or the reaching
after
truth, the reed’s duress a reach-
ing-thru as well. His would-be sound
implied a removal out of the world
by
barely an inch, the nearness of it a
taunt so bereaved it broke, pathos
and redirect. The sound resided in
the
body of the horn it seemed. Some-
thing of a citric squint there was to
it lived in the horn’s visionary bell…
“Vantage and vignette are all there ever
is,”
he reminded Dahjale and Andrean-
nette, “the is and the of, the horn’s hol-
low harboring fret but also future.”
On
that we all opened up, stitched fore-
heads futuristic and swollen, fur-
rowed brows the older play of what the
stit-
ches now were. “Doo-wop’s word-
less choral vocals,” he went on, “like
scat’s wordless vocals, wanted to be
hornlike, Dion in the pit at the Apollo
e-
nough to make Nietsche faint.” It was
all we could do not to do like Nietsche
would, so after our lungs and our hearts
his
would-be alto
was
____________________
Our serendipitous recital rolled equi-
noctially along, nothing in our way but
the words we named it with, except we
en-
joy them, they the rolling-along it-
self… Serendipitous, night’s equity
yet to accrue but looming, light broke
into colors passing thru the slit that was
the
window of soul. The precession of
the equinoxes pried it open as far as
we could tell… Towards idea, if not
mean-
ing, towards
note
