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Ode on Laundry, Lester Young, and Your Last Letter
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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Ode on Laundry, LesterYoung, andYour Last Letter I’m folding laundry two or three weeks before Christmas, listening to LesterYoung’s whispering sax embarrass the afternoon with its lax hold on each note, letting one go, then pulling it back into his bell, strutting a bit, Mr. Cock-a-doodle-do, and then he soars over sooty buildings like a raven, walls and doors below like toy houses.You’ve been dead twelve years, and still I look for you in passing faces—eyes, hands, the trill of your laughter, but you’re gone much as the arpeggio that disappears into Oscar’s piano solo or the blackT-shirts under the stacks of boxer shorts and lime green cotton panties, the piling on of hurts, warts, dirt, and the scraping away.There’s my stardust erupting on the other side of the solo. I must have read your last letter a thousand times, the paper almost transparent. I look at the curve and taper of your handwriting for a message beyond the words, and between the upslanted lines of A’s and Z’s I’ve heard you promise everything that time has taken back like Billie’s wounded voice that’s arched and pulling now on the CD player. I am left here with three mementos—the letter, a photo-booth black-and-white with four frames, a stutter of time, both of us with long hair, mine blonde, yours as dark as a starless night, laughing at nothing.And there’s the scarf you knitted, full of holes, that I take out every winter and wrap around my neck, touching it as if I were touching you once last time. So many things have changed. I’ve cut 9 my hair, and it has darkened, as the day has.What if you were sitting with me now, Billie and Lester sliding between each other’s voices, the register soaring and dipping like a hunter’s bird?What could I say that I didn’t say?There is only this—the every day of laundry, this music, the honking trucks on the street below, and women with bags rushing home on hurried feet. 10 ...