THE COLTRANE IN YOU
por il miglior fabbro
Meaning you sit
at your desk tonight
with an angel
on one shoulder
and a lion
on the other
to circle & poke
the first coal
John’s gospel
darkens or lights.
Meaning we see
how inky-haired
& lightheaded,
you float in the space
between to trace
a central question—
can a “reunion
of broken parts”
forge a portrait
of the Beloved
as Euler’s Identity?
Meaning we learn
how faith might shape
at least half the sound,
how apostasy might be
a lozenge loitering
on the tongue,
how you—cartographer
on a bullet train—
seek to phrase
your notes toward
a supreme fiction
—versus gothic of god—
and move past
mere odes or elegies.
Meaning we ponder
how at the wheel
of the warship of worship
you whirl as the square root
of minus one extending
into chords which bloom
to maroon in the bluest
mountains of duende.
Meaning we discern
how certain starred charts
—once incomplete—
now become guide
in a bitter suite
as incensed ropes of smoke
muscle music
from hunger or hunter
—how want might pay
to probe the pouty mouth
of lament or outline
the angel and lion
of Evangelion.
Meaning we trace
why the same L
that hinges them—
archaic name
for god or
vernacular for loss—
may laud both
ode & elegy.
Meaning what if
the “good news”
concludes
the Beloved’s Christian name
is Apophenia?
I don’t know
if sufis such as
Trane & Rumi
knew all twelve ways
to kneel and kiss the ground,
but surely their
chromatic Ohs
mean ensō
in modulation.
Meaning what if
we wish to learn
how to be drawn
so to speak
into a circle of fifths
or to Picasso piano keys
into a grander motif.
Does this re-choir
any Acknowledgement
of “our father”?
Meaning we watch
your language to sense
how a talent may
also be a weight,
how your gift gives pause
before purpling
in turbulent Resolution
of relief.
How wind from a box
may spill bottled spirits
—e pluribus unum—
as if God is an American
Sonnet distilled
by Wanda.
Meaning we sense
a minor relative
—or a relative minor—
a key to infuse Pursuance
with a full-hipped logic,
to Bearden the burden
of our double basis
as battered sticks shatter
and every Zildjian
shivers into
a symbol brushed by
what seeps from
your horn as Psalm.
Meaning in the beginning
was the word
and the word was moan.
So you hear
Matthew & Mark
but chant John’s
enchanted four syllables
to brook Gwendolyn’s theory
of the lyric between lines
which tonight—
as the angel & lion
conflate and conflict
—you train
towards wholly writ.
