Al Young

DROWNING IN THE SEA OF LOVE

                                     (Fragment)

Fathom after fathom
the fullness of being no place else
empties me to love

There's no other way to explain
this zoom this taking
leave which is really giving
leave without notice
or the other way around

It's hard to even breathe under
all this sea & seeing
much less swim or float

And so floating deeper
deeper the surface blurs
& tunnels gold and blue
with glittering entrances and
ways to new worlds bubble up

Fathom after fathom
the bones lighten the blood
lets air & warmth curl
around night-questions
answerable at daylight level
until soon there is no more
leaving no more coming back
green with newness only
the hum of peaceful heat
inside one ear the madness
of water making its choices
all at once afterwards
in the rush defying aftermath
fathom after fathom

POETRY AND PUBLIC POLITICS

Poetry not so much invades as makes
public space that winter cannot cut without icing
everything over and up. Out don't count

It ain't no piece of cake, but you ain't got to call
no 911, either. When all is said and done,
when morning blows coolly through your bedroom window,
slatting your face with shadows of mini-blinds,
art knows more than you know now about cook-offs,
write-oils and change. Because you still loathe capitalism,
you hunger; you cheat yourself You've passed up sound,
exotic boodie. You've missed out on some good food, too.

Baby, maybe like exquisite air-dried cheese, the luxury
of spirit weakens. Time keeps no record. You age.
Life mellows, then explodes to the taste like silence.

You love it. You love life's golden imperfections,
your democratic exclusion from key events, the polls;
this phase of moon you see, campaign and care for.

OLD TRANE, SAN DIEGO

Under the RR Bridge
a silly even fickle sonance
dances & brings us all around
to rounder, sounder ways of hearing
what the heart flowers
in her private midnight-cum-dawn
hours unobserved. Under Capricorn.
Clouds bring us closer to the dark
sweetmeat of our basic yearning.
Crying, the soul snaps again &
again in dancing clusters of jazz
again, jazz again revolved around
the saxophonic night. Hey, it's
the 20th Century in North America
-almost 21. Do you know
where your promises went? Or what
sky is telling us what?
Hug me quickly and tell me what
I've needed for so long to hear.

Trains' whistles blow in one color only
-blue. And there was no bluer bellow
than the one that comforted me at India
& Date Streets, Little Italy, the strangest
hot January since 1906. Back east the 50-degree
below zero trend was taking off, but
in my room at La Pensione, I was running
the ceiling fan & wondering why I hadn't brought
suntan lotion, That blue-black diesel call
poured into my bed, my coffee, my bath, my bags,
my head & all the books I lay there reading;
the cloud-blue sky protecting Little Italy
by day, the Lamplight District nights.
Downtown, the home of homelessness,
in the 99 cents store, a curious young woman,
all brown & tan, Mexico-born, eyed me up & down
& laughed when I talked to her of earthquake skies.
She might've been remembering Mexico City
the year the whole mountainside trembled
and it all caved in.

                                     But it was my Spanish;
the very word terremoto, a little like
Quasimodo-monsters, both-that made her laugh;
that made me world-weary giggly a halfday late.
At 4:31 a.m. my single hotel bed already had
turned into a waterbed, so strong was the song
L.A. was blowing. "Here we go again," I told
San Diego. "Haven't we ridden this freight car
before? Why didn't your horn sound a warning?"

ON THE ROAD WITH BILLIE

Your heart might have been beating like a hammer,
but this was not a drama I needed, much less staged.
Black and Catholic out of Baltimore. 'What else?
Who did you think you were? I thought I knew.
The sound of dreams remembered-that's who.
You covered the waterfront. We dogged the road.

There was no way those clouds were going anywhere
without us drifting right along. "No quarrels,
no insults, and all morals"? Hardly. In flooded Oregon
we had to get used to wet and wet and wet, get
their jokes about web feet, and get it that patches
of blue popped up often and oddly around 4 p.m.,

wake-up time, just outside Portland. God bless
the child who knew you didn't need to drown
your past regrets in coffee and cigarettes, when
we soaked up hours so ripe with rain we learned
every DETOUR AHEAD sign by heart. Sex didn't fix.
In this itinerary, the lovesick sound of you worked

more than willows. That trip you took on the train
to get there, remember? "When it rains in here,"
you sang, "it's storming on the sea." Baby, speak
for yourself You were the one as hard to land
as the Isle de France. Taking a chance on love,
you took a fall. You had your songs to keep you warm.

You wished on the moon. "Some other spring," you
sighed, then slipped through June, a sieve, and got
so high you couldn't get back by the Fourth of July.
The local fuzz, a fan, knowing I'd be freaked,
tang up all sing-song, mocking you, and said:
"That love won't turn the trick to end despair."

Billie, the tricks you turned, the twists blues took.
Why people tear the seams of other folks' dreams
was all it ever was about for you. Am I unfair?
Some kiss did cloud my memory. Still, I smuggled
you to Seattle. At every stop that we made,
I thought about you, too. The crack of dawn

and that crack you peeped through, the one leading
back-was all the crack there was back then.
When the war broke out and opium split town,
up jumped smack, and you and all your hophead
pals went down and copped. "You go to my head,"
you groaned. Where did it all go? Where did you go?

"I get no kick from cocaine"? "Mere alcohol
doesn't thrill me at all"? It made you smile awhile.
The war? They changed the chords, the beat,
you know, it never stopped. They changed the bill.
The War on Poverty, it bombed, but War on Drugs,
it's on a roll, like we were on a roll-April in Paris,

Autumn in New York, Nice Work If You Can Get It;
as if you'd be waiting for me always in the doorways of
Trailways and Greyhounds and train depots, small
hotels with wishing wells, and all the grand hotels;
the same old fine brown frame, sweating like an orchid,
and your heart beat so that you could hardly speak.

PRELUDE TO A KISS

                                       in memory of Ella Fitzgerald

There was a time when singing or playing a ballad was almost the
same as the whisper your lips make the instant before they pooch
out and stretch, then reach to touch hers.

Her lips will feel the warm wind your whisper makes in the life-pre-
serving urgency of moving mouth-to-mouth. Whole career moves,
investments have been based on this, a kiss.

There at the after-whisper-when breath saith unto breath: "Death,
go back out and wait in the car, baby, we got some unfinished busi-
ness we need to take care of up in here"-there Ben Webster or
Lester might pester you into listening to thrilling snapshots of their
up-close worlds, where rivers and stars and cyclones and witch-hunts
and hatred found and hounded them endlessly. But Ella's voice
would graze the words and say: Psssst-psssst and Shhh-shhh.

Whenever Body Snatchers invaded, remember? Remember the
Memorex commercial? Shattered, the glass itself was thinking:
"Better this way than whoops! Better this than drunk-ass fans argu-
ing. Who was best-Billie, Sarah, Dinah, Carmen or Ella?"

There she stood, or there she sat at piano, not playing, sometimes in
pain-a twisted ankle, a mangled heart-wiggling around on that
bench, whispering her bloodbeat to crowds in Spain, Brazil, Japan,
the Netherlands, Australia, Oslo, L.A., Akron, Accra, Krakow, and 0
how they knew when her voice-a whip, a feather-was busy
inventing universes they always thought had been in place all along.

Wrong. Ella Fitzgerald launched songs far more reliably than NASA
launched spacecraft. She sent them spinning into orbits that enno-
bled, that ran rainbows around your shoulders.

We couldn't carry her around in that basket forever. Ella owned the
world the way she earned our owning her. Every time her voice
floats back, that kiss moves in, and then begins.

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©2000/2004 by Al Young