Chaos, or On Learning that John Coltrane Didn’t Want “Om” to Be Released
After “Om”
skattering rosarios, clack, thwak, bang
bowl over, shiver, shiver
chaos, baby, that’s masterful
just a cloving of the melon mind
nasty clang, ghost grumble
sinner’s howl, mansion smashed,
burned to elder shreds and clarified by
history.
I make all things clean.
Strike of pain, cymbal of old glory
elephant grinding out gray note,
bass sweltering and swelling and heaving,
coughing up warmth we haven’t seen
since we were babies, maybe, I’ve got
another proposition that this
entire castle of animal teeth and drought
and fresh powder and love is going
to shudder to fall
And you you you you you you
won’t be left to watch it burn.
Pale Blue, or Well, It Ain’t Necessarily So
For Mary Lou Williams
High-piled signature hair, pale thin light, your fresh-skinned
ghost arrives; Blue, black-suited and normal.
You only show off a handsome profile,
left-leaning in the tender lines of your ageless face.
Always Saving Something.
I told you and I mean it: you are one of the most beautiful
men alive, and I add the “one of” to temper the truth—
that I forgot about everyone else’s ordinary faces
and flimsy, contemporary minds months back.
Even if, even if
if I am just
another weird girl,
or how I used to belong to Muddy,
I wonder what you think, I wonder what
undulates
in your bottomless mind.
Anyway. Cut the tape.
It’s too smoky and jazz-stuffed here
and you aren’t around, but the silken strings
are firing new electric blues and even on a throbbing, sweetened
night like this, I’d replace those strings with you.
Any damn day.
Mary Lou said I have to say: Well baby that ain’t necessarily so
that I want you, that every little shiver of piano can’t
bang huge without your new keys throbbing and she’s probably
right. Still, here I am—sliding deeper into a slick hell
or destruction but—look,
fuck it.
I’m not like that. I’m better.
So, when your ghost arrives, blue-suited and
grinning thin, I stand up, in bliss,
trying not to lose
my own signature spin.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), When Trying to Return Home (Counterpoint Press), Kinds of Grace (Flowersong Press), Neon Steel (Cornerstone Press/U.Wisc-Stevens Point) and VERSUS (Texas Review Press.) She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (prose), CantoMundo (poetry), Kimbilio (fiction) and Sundress Academy for the Arts (hybrid) and her work has been a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Must-Read by Bookshop, Elle, Today and others. She is fiction editor at Pleiades, faculty at Yale Writers’ Workshop and an assistant professor of English at UMKC.