| Elegy with Mistakes All through It How the crash took weeks of planning—a dwarfing Ringling Brothers wind-snared tent, the soon-to-be-junked engines fresh-painted with lime-green trim, miles of track veering from the main Katy line & freshly-dug wells for the tens of thousands who watched The Crush Collision, an arranged wreck to scrap two trains already doomed in order to make a buck. The way the whistle-locked engines plunged the track, howling for nothing before pummeling head-on, & when the boilers ruptured, shrapnel pelted down like rain & even though a few were killed in the stampede, the crowd sprinted back to the still-hot metal, prying up souvenirs. Scott Joplin, we think, also looked on, concocting a song in aftermath, no matter the distance between the piano’s syncopated clack & that still-steaming ruin. This is guess work, of course— nearly all the traces of Joplin’s roundabout path turned long ago to char. Which didn’t stop my grappling after those empty scraps while you played for me that last time. How long before I wandered off into my scattered thoughts about an earth-trembling roar Joplin maybe heard, or how in a smoke-clogged brothel on Battle Row, the pasties on a girl named Bubbie grazed the man’s neck as he burned through the refrain? I want that day back. To listen again to the soft-shoe rhythms you found in the backbeat of Joplin & Bach, to hear you work even a few notes of those partitas & rags which consumed your last years. Was it even the Crush Collision March you played? I heard Bethena, I think, a near-dirge written just after his second wife died a few weeks past their wedding, although some think that song trawls another loss altogether. To be honest, I can’t remember much except the wind & your walker’s scrape as you limped to the bench—which would be, I know, the last thing you’d want me to say. Let me try again. This piece, this piece, you once began, beaming, clutching the B Minor Mass score to your chest before drifting into silence, as if everything you meant was clear. Making me, at fourteen, gangly, acne-pocked, slumped at the keys, insist all the more that the jangle-slurred chords of Sweet Jane were the sole worthwhile thing. What did I know? Precisely jackshit, you made it clear, especially about Bach, who had twenty kids, you told me during my first lesson, so you know he loved fucking. Which didn’t stop me griping each week about trills, finely-wrought fugues, the harpsichord’s frail plucking. Or, later, the leapfrogging left hand of ’S Wonderful I botched until you slammed the keyboard shut & asked, Kid, why do you waste my time? Any chance it’s because I’m black? Who knows what I stammered back, sweating in silence, October light tumbling the room? Or why you humored me all those years, even as I butchered scale after scale & my still-cracking voice hacked up the Halleluiah Chorus before you ordered me to just mouth every goddamn word. Please. It was easy enough to move my lips, following along, pretending to exalt the stretched-to-breaking syllables of forever, a word repeated & made slack until it seemed to collapse, meaning it began to mean again. Ragtime, Joplin said, because the time is ragged. Old friend, might it be more so. Might time break from its metronome tick that carries me further from the days you were here, from the wind’s caterwaul & the mackerel sky that last time I half-heard you play. Without music, I’d die, you told me once matter of fact, & for a time we both pretended the correlate was true: you’d live as long as there was song. Why can’t there be one thing that seems enough just now? Watch how my monkey-mind leaves melody behind for a riff on John Taylor, eye-surgeon, chevalier, Don Juan who blinded both Handel & Bach with his straying incisions & useless hodgepodge of balms made from pigeon blood, sugar, baked salt. What am I doing, now that you’re gone, starting this piece with a train wreck, or any disaster held at arm’s length? If all I’m trying to say, while bounding through pimples, Gershwin, Lou Reed, is something we already know about failure & grief, just how far am I from Taylor the Quack’s smoke-&-mirror cures, his trademark carriage covered with blind, wide-open, embroidered eyes wild-gawking in every direction? Do you remember once, out of nowhere, stopping the class & making us listen to Coltrane’s Alabama? No one said a thing as the words from the eulogy for the four girls killed in the Birmingham church were translated into breath driven through a tenor sax, & we heard that lament unfastened from threadbare words, prayer turned wholly to song. Are you shitting me, I can almost hear you say, using, of all things, that piece as a bridge, a means? Forgive me, as always, my bungling. My false starts & how the loss of you seems to trump everything today, derailing all other loss. All I mean to evoke is language becoming a disconsolate wail. Unearthly, resolute. Or even the single note McCoy Tyner plays chant-like for nearly the entire song, hammering the same key as if unable to stop, or knowing it was the sole thing sufficient. Enough, enough, I know you’d say. Stop. For fuck’s sake. Listen. | |