________________________________________
Birdland
for Sterling Brown
So I take my seven bucks
to buy a railroad ticket.
And with a little luck
hitchhike to the station.
The money comes from playing
in a dance band with Vinny Gallo
braying on his tenor sax
and Charley Panzner—
I forget the others—
and me on the piano.
When no one is looking I play
solo piano in taverns after hours
up and down Long Island’s South Shore,
singing Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life.
I don’t tell my folks when I hop
on a train at age 14 and head
to Birdland where I sit
in the Peanut Gallery for nothing
and drink in Miles Davis,
John Coltrane, Count Basie
and Oscar Peterson. And not far away
you could go to the Embers
and hear Red Norvo on the vibraphone
play the Blues in E Flat.
And Stan Getz whose tunes I’d been trying
to play all year and ever since.
Sterling, this was before I met you.
Were you there too, singing your poems:
saying “Slim in Atlanta” and “After Winter”
and “Sister Lou.” Or listening to “Ma Rainey”:
O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo’ song:
Now you’s back
Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong…
O Ma Rainey,
Li’l and low…*
Sterling, you made us stand up
in your living room while you played jazz
on your phonograph and wouldn’t let us
sit down till we could name who was playing.
Sometimes we stood a long, long time.
It was Erroll Garner and Lester Young.
Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.
And there was Satchmo who we loved.
I never told my folks where I’d been, pretended
to spend the night at a friend’s.
But I wouldn’t trade that smokey room
and that gorgeous music that filled us up
to the top until it was time to sneak out
of the house and head uptown to Birdland
once more. And years later, Sterling, to stand
in your living room, under the alms
of a great poet having us listen
to the music you loved and to the words
you wrote. Sterling, we could have stayed
there the rest of our lives.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Myra Sklarew, professor emerita American University, founder of the MFA Program, former president of the Yaddo Artist’s Community, studied biology at Tufts, bacterial viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, and did research at Yale Medical School in memory and the prefrontal cortex. She has an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her twelve poetry collections include Lithuania: New and Selected Poems; Prose: Like a Field Riddled by Ants, Over the Rooftops of Time, An Invitation to a Country called Aging (with Patricia Garfinkel), and A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania. A new collection of essays on science and medicine, Lie Perfectly Still, is near completion. In 2011, Sklarew helped launch “A Splendid Wake”—a project to document poets, poetry movements, and literary organizations in the Washington, D.C. area from 1900 to the present, sponsored by the Special Collections Research Center at the Gelman Library, GWU, organized by local poets. [For more on Sterling Brown, click here.]
(*from Beyond the Blues by Rosey E. Pool, The Hand and Flower Press, 1962, England.)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Go to Source
Author: Terence Winch
