THE COLTRANE IN YOU
por il miglior fabbro
Meaning you lean
over your desk tonight
with an angel
on one shoulder
and a lion
on the other
to poke
the first coal
of John’s gospel
—how improvisation
makes a gift
of the present—
until it darkens
or lights.
Meaning I trace
how faith becomes
a basis of
your sound,
even as apostasy
loiters as a lozenge
on your tongue,
how you—painter
on a bullet train—
know fiction
is the agent
of magenta,
but still phrase
notes towards
your supreme fiction
—a gothic of frogs.
Meaning I ponder
how at the wheel
of the warship of worship
you whirl into
the square root
of minus one—
a palette which maroons
in the bluest mountains
of duende.
Meaning I discern
how certain starred charts
—once incomplete—
fill with symbols
in a bitter suite
as incensed ropes of smoke
muscle music
from hunger
—how the gloss
of want can divine
the pouty mouth
of lament to voice
the angel & lion
of Evangelion.
Meaning I learn
why the same L
which hinges them—
archaic name
for god or
vernacular for loss—
becomes locus
for both
lilac & lotus.
Meaning what if
the “good news”
concludes
the Beloved’s Christian name
is Apophenia?
Who knows
if Rumi & Trane
knew all twelve ways
to kneel and kiss the ground,
but surely their
chromatic Ohs
signaled ensō
in modulation.
Meaning I hear
how inky-haired
& lightheaded,
you float in the space
between to trace
its central question—
can Euler’s Identity
be a portrait
of the Beloved
as a “union
of broken parts”?
Meaning I wish now
to learn how
to be drawn
so to speak
into a circle of fifths
or to Picasso piano keys
into a grander motif.
Would this re-choir
any Acknowledgement
of “our father”?
Meaning I watch
your language to sense
how a talent may
also be a weight,
how a gift
can give pause
to any Resolution.
How wind from a box
spills bottled spirits
—e pluribus unum—
as if God was an American
Sonnet distilled
by Wanda.
Meaning I trace
your “little songs”
—minor relatives
of a relative minor—
keys to infuse Pursuance
with a full-hipped logic,
to Bearden the burden
of our double basses
until battered sticks shatter
and every cymbal
is brushed by
what satins from
your horn as Psalm.
Meaning I begin
to wonder if
in the beginning
was the word
and the word was moan.
As if you mimic
Matthew & Mark
but your canvas
of John’s four syllables
seeks a lyric cartography
of our torso’s interior—
which tonight
means to frame
whatever words
you train towards
wholly writ.
