What I know About Music

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT MUSIC / Leslie Adrienne Miller The crowd is thin tonight because Blues don't describe our lives anymore. The dozen seconds we have to wait for the last note to sound are too many, and the young people wade into the dark in search of something more synthesized and less likely to spring those moments of silence. I never liked Blues myself until they came to town in your eyes, down my street on your bicycle and found me utterly happy in the grass. There was no reason for love. There is no reason now to say I was or am in love except for the taste of ash left in my mouth, the few charred images of last spring, when my woman friend plied me with plates of food, sweet wine, and Blues to win me back, to return to me the precious sense of irony about the self all lovers lose. At last there was nothing for me but the women with yard long voices, used to men who moved in and out of their lives like hot knives. There are names for such men, but they lie in the silence behind the names of women who let them out of the car, the back door, the throat leaving off only where the saxophone starts. Last night it was sixties pop in the hands of pseudo English punk, and the kids climbed all up on the tables waving their arms and hair. One heavy girl knocked over a few chairs and waved her cigarette. But this spring 220 · The Missouri Review won't be the same. Even the few graffitied stalls in the John are empty, no one swaying before the lipstick marked mirror, no drums in their bones, no dozen silent seconds in which to turn to each other and let the burning come. Leslie Adrienne Miller The Missouri Review · 221 ...