Ellingtonia

1

. . . And the lamp caught fire

after he put a blue cashmere sweater over it.
Subtle as a Nance obbligato
on filmy violin--two brown curves en passant,
purflings ease sound out of the stank of violin parts:
          belly, waist, chin rest, rib, sound hole, pegbox, tailpiece, rounded shoulder.
Ellington was an expert on them all.

2

______
libretto
______

holy writ:      Billy Strayhorn would wake up,
compose for four hrs. Would wake Duke

: Blood Count or Ballad for Very Tired and Very Sad Lotus Eaters
for example, & he'd bring his golden torso up,
& finish off the rest of the composition.

In the morning, after composing
          all night, Duke would open the closet

[Full of blue cashmere sweaters]
        & His Orchestra was playing it the next morning:
Plucky, plugugly, pozzolana, porous, & perfect blues.

3

Daffdowndilly Ebullience      Daibutsu Ear      Damselfish Ectogenesis
Dardanelles Edge      Darksome Eiderdown      Demonax Ellipse
Desirous Empire      Doughbelly Eohippus      Dovetail Espalier

4

Salieri eavesdropped
Mozart playing a word-sex game;
just then the creamy, squeezing oboe
exalted-unbolted Chimaphila umbelata plumbed beautiful music
the color of blonde night: red plum jam
on pumpernickel: a Puerto Rican hermaphrodite
putting on pink lipgloss.

5

Wednesday night, Ellington, who
could forefeel the slightest discolored saxifrage
leaf easing between two rocks, heard
through a catnap & a halfdozen chewed
pencil tips, the babygreen, sweetpea Billy
exhale.

Sean Singer has published poems in Pleiades and The Indiana Review. He won the Hart Crane Scholarship to the Catskills Poetry Workshop and an Academy of American Poets Prize.

...