From Miles on the Bridge and Other Poems
Miles on the Bridge
Music holds these flowers fresh as the afternoon
A single long note stays the same as the first time you
heard it
Sitting on the floor in someone’s apartment in the city.
The first cigarette, the first glass of wine
The first dangerous wanting of what’s beyond that man’s
eyes
All held new as rain in that long beating note from Miles’ trumpet
Driving across the bridge into the city
Surrounded by clouds and steel, the cars coming and going
The red eyes of cars going
The white eyes of cars coming
The beat of wheels on the road. Max Roach.
Between then and now, things happened
Through Sketches of Spain to Bitches Brew
What had only been imagined began to take form,
Shine out in hard lines, then fade into what might have been.
A lot of cigarettes smoked and put out.
Kisses and arguments. Paychecks. Despair.
An orange balloon on a baby’s birthday.
Wisps of fog in my face walking up the hills.
The lights of the city.
The sound of a saxophone, a trumpet, from somebody’s window
Winding, winding, ending on that undecided, hopeful seventh.
But O just to come up on that next bridge
With the eyes and heat of a twenty year old
Entering a great city!