Poets and Poems - Bud Caywood

For John Coltrane

I imagine sheets of a slow sipping sound
in the black corners of a coffee house;
guttural chords etching the film of cigarette smoke
into the burnt tin ceiling tiles,
and the red neon sign outside jumping
like skinned knuckles bleeding.
The first time I heard a John Coltrane song
my brain formed echoes of a generation gone;
shadow people, projected on coffee house walls,
hot passions and indigo moods smoldering,
that big brass sax rattling every ear
as they begin to snort, smoke and carry on
like Sodom and Gomorrah.
In his mellow fallow of dizzy sounds
I wish I could have seen his desperate cheeks
swelling like black balloons,
that rat-tat-boom he played in those dark places;
lips, fingers, eyes, gone or going,
breath burned out, his warm-wet air tasteless;
the sax like sex has no inhibitions with strangers,
morning comes and you hide your eyes
from the thick sin between music and heavy breathing,
and he played that way.
His horn in darkness is a kind of blue note
sliding away from synthesis of pain,
and burns in my ears like the hum of a moving river;
my spine feeling his fingertips pumping rhythm
like the rolling mimes of the encroaching Eros
moving toward a slow warm night.
When he died on earth,
one large soundless hole was left wide open.


[Bud Caywood will be reading his work at the Bethlehem Branch Library Poetry Reading in Bethlehem, NC on February 18th at 7:00pm along with Anne Chandonnet, Scott Owens, and Tim Peeler.]

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