Poetry Thursday - Words for Jazz Perhaps by Michael Longley

WORDS FOR JAZZ PERHAPS

I Elegy for Fats Waller

Lighting up, lest all our hearts should break,

His fiftieth cigarette of the day,

Happy with so many notes at his beck

And call, he sits there taking it away,

The maker of immaculate slapstick.

With music and with such precise rampage

Across the deserts of the blues a trail

He blazes, towards the one true mirage,

Enormous on a nimble-footed camel

And almost refusing to be his age.

He plays for hours on end and though there be

Oases one part water, two parts gin,

He tumbles past to reign, wise and thirsty,

At the still centre of his loud dominion -

THE SHOOK, THE SHAKE, THE SHEIKH OF ARABY.

II BILLIE HOLIDAY (An Epitaph)

DEATH, LIKE ALL YOUR HABITS, CAME TO STAY,

DARED FACE YOUR MUSIC, TOOK YOUR BREATH AWAY.

III BUD FREEMAN IN BELFAST (November 1965)

Fog horn and factory siren intercept

Each fragile hoarded-up refrain. What else

Is there to do but let those notes erupt.

Until your fading last glissando settles

Among all other sounds - carefully wrapped

In the cotton wool from aspirin bottles?

IV TO BESSIE SMITH

You bring from Chattanooga Tennessee

Your huge voice to the back of my mind

Where, like sea shells salvaged from the sea

As bright reminders of a few week's stay,

Some random notes are all I ever find.

I couldn't play your records every day.

I think of tra-ra-rossan, Inisheer,

Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain -

Those landscapes I must visit year by year.

I do not live with sounds so seasonal

Nor set up house for good. Your blues contain

Each longed-for holiday, each terminal.

Michael Longley (b.1939) (via)

"She thought about Michael Longley, and of his poem to the blues singer Bessie Smith. The lines were haunting, and came back to her whenever she heard someone mention the Hebrides: I think to Tra-na-Rossan, Inisheer / Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain.  ... Yes, the poet was right: Harris and the other islands were often drenched by rain, even if not always horizontal. It was more of a drifting rain, she thought, a curtain, a veil that came in from the Atlantic, white and smoky as an attenuated cloud."

This from The Charming Quirks of Others, an Isabel Dalhousie novel by Alexander McCall Smith. 

The "attenuated cloud" reminded me of some of Norman Ackroyd's engravings of watery islandy rocky rainy scenes from around Scotland ...

Norman Ackroyd, Trenish Isles, 2007 (via)