Speechless In Heaven, 1975

Give me jazz guitar, Bonfá, fusion, fusing series of notes;

gentle rain strokes memories of sunlight on pool water,

water warmer that the air around it, a dark apartment,

shelves of jazz platters, my fingers placing Jacaranda

on the turntable over and over again letting the needle

down gently, lying on the sofa, absorbing the art of listening,

over and over learning the wonder of headphones translating

the strummed notes directly past ear drums to nodding

head to swaying shoulders along the back to hips,

to the feet that keep the beat close to tap it out softly,

all so softly, no denying the empty room that refuses

silence while the sun slides across summer blues.

Published in: The Pointed Circle, 39th edition

Portland Community College, 2023.

Poems often come out of my conversations with the work of other poets. Speechless in Heaven, 1975 was the fourth in two series of encounters with Jean Valentine poems.

The first series began shortly after her death, when a New York Times obituary sent me in search of her work. I discovered her website http://www.jeanvalentine.com . Those were the dark, early days of the covid crises. The generous offering of poems gave me a place to focus creative energy. Beginning from the last poem provided (Dream Barker, 1965, the earliest written) and working up the list and forward in time, each poem was a call waiting for my response.

The source poem was “Coltrane, Syeeda’s Song Flute.” http://www.jeanvalentine.com/poems/04coltrane.html It addresses Marilyn and Peter (research has failed to identify who they were) and John Coltrane. That creates the intimacy of an overheard conversation. I played the recording while I wrote. I found a place to write from:

Listening here in the late quiet you can think great things of us all, I think we will all, Coltrane, meet speechless and easy in Heaven. . . .

Jazz to me is afternoons in my Uncle Milton’s apartment in San Diego exploring his huge collection of albums, while he was at work. One I couldn’t get enough of was Luiz Bonfá’s Jacaranda. It felt tropical, sun-streaked, sophisticated. I was eighteen.

The Jean Valentine website provided me with a large canvas. I’m drawn to such large projects. Manuscripts I’ve worked on include my Danse Macabre, my graduate project at University of San Francisco, which is an exploration of plagues that have afflicted humanity in the form of dramatic dialogues between a messenger of death with a fluid identity and a person or persons faced with dying. Another has me In the Middle of the Journey that resembles Dante’s Commedia. One way to avoid the feeling of panic associated with facing a blank page (or screen) is to finish one poem with a sense of where the next will begin.