MARILYN

Like baying tracking dogs bounding
stone walls on radio waves a dj named
"the Hound" out of Albany-Troy-Schenectady
came on after midnight with "the sound of the hound,"
the Five Satins singing "In the Still of the Night."

We'd be headed for a sobering burger
in exhausted Dionysian with the volume jacked
so high the glass walls of our Eustachian tubes
shattered, our ears bled on the street named
for the guy who invented the US banking system,

rhythm and blues-ing it to the Spectown Diner
which I still liked but was more enthralled
by West Coast jazz, Mullligan, Baker,
Chico Hamilton with that cool LA sound
like a detective story in the fog,

the sound that smelled like suntan lotion,
salt air, and Pacific waves full of tragic clarinets
about pretty women with one bad weakness.
Mine was a bleach blond, square-shouldered
five foot four with breasts like two peaks of

whipped cream. She was strictly from Providence
but I met her on the Cape and used to bum down there
to hang out. She told me all she wanted was
to play with the big boys. We'd sit on a bench
looking out on the city from this hill where Brown was.
What she conjured in the men who fell for her
was not of this world where we were rode
hard by the witch of worry. She was the cool
spring that made trouble float away on a kiss.
I'd sing to her. She would smile like a cat

as I smoked cigarettes to make me sound
more like King Pleasure. We were a couple
with no money and when it got dark we went
to a cemetery near an Abyssinian church
and listened to the brethren testify how the Lord

had come in a Mississippi delta dream
and here they were, like birds of the air in the city
that means God provides at the tip of Narragansett
Bay where Coltrane skirled "My Favorite Things"
on soprano sax with a sound nobody'd heard

since Sidney Bechet picked up the instrument
in London … and what has this to do with
octave-leaping and great crescendos of spiral
staircases on saxophone odes, never mind
Charlie Parker in my head with the yearning

to express, to press air out through my lips
in the hope of saying something of the memory?
Sometimes people get hurt so bad there's no
saving them. They got to save themselves
or not at all … Is there a rhetoric of regret?

Is there a lyric sleight-of-hand to be performed
that is the blues in the still of this night?
Almost as if she has died from drinking one too
many Bloody Marilyns …
I used to dream

I'd improvise poetry, not write at all
just get up on-stage and scat-sing original lyrics
that would be like "Round Midnight" or King
Pleasure singing "Parker's Mood," jumping
an octave like "where will I be tomorrow,"

be it ever so tenderly fingered because he couldn't
cut the men who scared him … I would
compose a tune called "What I Didn't Do for Love,"
which will be a song about how sometimes you
can't bear to watch a friend go down