Persons Unknown

Sensitivity

9 Sensitivity May 4, 1959 for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959 Six weeks since that whisper rose into the window of a stage behind the Half Note’s bar, whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise, Lester Young is dead, six weeks since he fell from the sky, dead off the plane from Paris, and each night this goodbye’s gone more sensitive. Now the flats are hid, and Handy’s learned to fold the sound of breath inside his notes—the bleeding throat, tongue’s last epileptic flutter— while Mingus thrills the bass in waves of sound and fail no microphone can hold. Drinks tremble like the river halfway from here to the grave, pulled by wind or plummet, cough of strings beneath the hand, and uptown a tape is waiting for magnets to say this again, a teletype is writing a story for tomorrow’s Times— a body pulled from a river in Mississippi, with only fingers for a name. Here only the drinks are listening 10 as Ervin rises, ghosting Handy’s lead, and even they cannot hear how the rivers heal their quiet, how they fill their scars so perfectly that remember feels like forget. Then the breath is gone. The wood hums a moment longer, and each surface smoothes till the glasses and the waters are glass again and ready to catch each clap, each note that falls. ...