Sweet
All is Well/--This was what Charlie Parker/Said when he played, All is Well.
Jack Kerouac
Horns & whiskey
& the light graying into dawn,
with Bird or Billie, or Ornette
on the turntable, the only thing
in that shitty basement apartment
worth a damn.
Only two or three of us left by then,
so late, the hardcore, the sleepless,
fueled by that inexhaustible
need to grab it all, whatever
it was, as much as we could,
knowing all the while
we could never get enough.
God, how we would talk, argue,
fight for hours -- jazz, the Beats,
the blues & rock & roll,
Nixon, Kissinger, the war & all
the goddamn liars.
There was booze & weed,
plenty of it, but none of us
burned as hot as you --
the white crosses
so your body could soar
as high as your heart
& the Qualudes to drag you,
finally, into dreamless sleep.
Cockroaches & coke in the sugar bowl,
none of us were saints, but you,
you thought nothing could touch you.
& by God, for a while nothing could,
holy & shining, the way
you had with women, & that horn
raw & sweet at the same time, so much
beauty & pain at once, shards of glass buried
in the pure sands of a wave-washed beach.
You came back but could never come home
from the green hell of Vietnam with a craving
nothing could fill for long & such a love
like I’ve never seen for every
breeze & tear & sunrise.
Oh you could blow, I mean
that horn & you said you wanted to blow
the whole damned laughing, crying,
loving, dying, fighting world
through that horn, breathe it all in
& turn everything that was ugly, holy.
Like that night-turning-to-morning
you said, let’s go & we went up
into the city & the sun
came up orange & cold & you
wet your lips & launched
into Bird -- After You’ve Gone --
while the bridges filled with cars
& the sun burned off the frost & then
you slowed it way down with I Can’t Get
Started, but what it was was you couldn’t
stop & nobody could follow where you went
& none of us could accept what you needed
to give & finally we stopped trying.
It wasn’t just me, I wasn’t the only
one who cut you to the bone, but when you finally
fled Pittsburgh for Denver
on that 3 AM Greyhound nobody
was happy but we all
breathed a sigh of relief.
You sent a couple of letters at first,
boasting about all the girls, how bright
the stars were, the huge heart of the night,
a different address every month or so,
& I sent a few postcards to whatever
address I had, with not much to report on,
& soon enough I stopped or you,
I don’t remember.
We all settled into the routines we once said never to,
but I’d think of you sometimes, knowing you
could never settle into anything like a routine
& years later I heard from somebody who heard
from somebody that there was a bum
they found frozen one January morning,
an old vet from Pittsburgh they thought,
with nothing to his name but an alto sax,
who haunted Colfax Ave. & oh,
but could he blow sweet.
from Steel Valley
