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Grappelli
Take It Don’t Mean a Thing
as one instance—the version
from ’35, with Django swinging
with such reckless insouciance
over brother Joseph’s pulsing banjo-
esque chords, the two of them free
as a pair of gypsies (which they were).
Hear what I mean about Stéphane’s
breathing rarefied air—as if
in some other life he had seen
fearless Egyptian engineers
scaling scaffolds on the first
of the World’s Seven Wonders
and thought how much like rappelling
to improvise lines on the violin?
Once he unraveled his art’s
dark secrets: “It is a mystery,
like the pyramids.”
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Thomas O’Grady is the author of two books of poems, What Really Matters and Delivering the News, both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the distinguished Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series. Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019 and a member of the Creative Writing faculty, he is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He divides his time between and among the banks of the mighty St. Joe River in South Bend, a converted rumrunners bunkhouse in Adamsville, Rhode Island, and the south shore of his native Prince Edward Island (Canada).
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Grappelli, drawing by Isabelle Derangere, 2020
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