Gershwin Visits
1.
One hundred glass pianos
Connected by ladders.
Among the rungs my father hangs,
Humming those tunes.
2.
Ivory cigarette holder
Clenched at a presidential angle.
Smoke, a tenor line,
Floats through the fretted grill.
3.
From his height my father nails a talisman
To each doorpost.
Jessel, Benny, the bat of Hank Greenberg,
The mash of those crushing harmonies.
And where he was seen--
Sardi's, the Brown Derby. Best of all,
Himself
Captured by the Pathé camera,
A day on the beach with Harpo.
4.
Foot-high swells of Rhapsody in Blue, surfing clarinet.
Not the New Land discovered
But the plate tectonics that
Move the island under him, aligned in the Hudson
Pointing north like a needle.
5.
Notes nail a trellis.
Notes soldered to staff, thirteenths
Dropped in the street, sharped ninths
Stuck on the Williamsburg Bridge where they
Could flatten a tire. Look at that, will you?
Somebody must have spilled them off the back
Of a truck.
6.
When he spoke over the surf,
What did Harpo say?
7.
My father humming the tunes,
Shot by his roadster, tan upholstery, glissands
Across the wire-strung bridge to the Riviera.
The Riviera burns down, Oscar Levant dies smoking
His sponsor's product.
Photographs
Slip loose from the heavy black page.
8.
Score for Klezmer horns and drums,
Drum heads white and starched,
Boiled shirt fronts, licorice sticks,
Keyboards from slides in the parks,
From chained swings down slides and up ladders.
9.
His fingers sit the keys,
Tent the keys, twelve fingers
Sit the see saw of his chords, monochromatic
Sequence, black on white rotogravure.
Wont you tell him please to put on some speed,
Follow my lead
My mother sings over the linen's fold, wet
Perfume of ironing and wood,
Watching over me, over me
A brown gravy covers me, carrot
And brisket alike. Sweet scent on the wind,
Gravy steam rising.
10.
In newsreels he and Harpo wear striped robes.
My father wears white.
Scallop-edged prints fit neatly in triangular pockets
That we have glued to the page.
The glue is drying.
11.
The youth of them all rises,
A cloud over a warm island.
Distant and gradually moving at us,
Blowing at us, full of the chill rain of time.
