-- To Jason Moran

slipped from its lacquer disc,

waiting for something to hold,

I've had since I was twelve

at the Gadsden Mall

Dubbed, it was a four-dollar soundtrack

for the swift point of a satellite

and break free....

Somewhere between the stars

was a song I hadn't heard,

maybe waiting on a gold LP,

like Voyager's, to be spun,

somewhere past Jupiter

which we'd seen on TV,



its color waiting folded in the dark

for any passing eye.

Afternoons, decades of hot light,

centuries had faded everything



dull as the Hank Jr. tape

stuck in my father's deck

so I'd dream it mumbling in static

past New Orleans or Houston



coming in clearer after sundown,

and maybe you were listening, too,

your hands ready for Monk's

percussive touch,



barrelhouse stomp forgotten

then uttered as a new idea,

fresh rhythm bouncing

the ionosphere.




The paper can make that sound,

crack of dust beneath the stylus,

and laid on the Steinway's low strings

catch the hammer



your beat hand makes.

It rattles, a recording

of the heart played back

through a busted amp,



a sock full of silver dollars

dropped beside the bed.

My mom said her grandfather kept them,

one for each rocket,



Mercury 3 to Apollo 10,

and the flight he'd waited for,

the broadcast he'd miss,

man walking on the moon,



who'd cut farm from forest,

from hoe cough to AM radio

and color TV, how he watched

the stars and waited,


which is why they'd let me

fall asleep in the yard....

Maybe I can go back now,

the dew



just about to bead, moon to curl

itself into those lenses,

blades about to flower

new constellations



in answer to the night

while the headphones pulse

their binary and theremin sine,

maybe I can go back



while space troughs in the acre's

old terraces, and I can

lean down and change the tape

so Blind Willie Johnson's



"Dark Was the Night, Cold

Was the Ground" can unreel...

it could rise from earth,

old language, or fall



from the gold record spinning

somewhere between the stars

where all the words

have gone to melody.



And you...wherever you are tonight,

reach into the dark and key

the figure, the record sleeve

tucked in the bass-clef string



so the beat sounds like a memory

of the heart played back

at a distance, through static

and years and wind.



It reaches back, like the future,

which is just another kind

of history, a shape

for whatever's missing



that fills its own outlines in.