Harp Jazz

Is Alice Coltrane dead I asked my friend and he said everyone’s dead. Right. If he was drunk already or if the sedative was what tricked his feet off bottom steps but I don’t think so, I don’t know how his wife died or how he found her. Someone cleaned. I wish I could hold you right. Their house had swallowed its quietness. A whole house of quietness, ingested. I cut the garden down because he asked me to. Stuffed willow and dill and tomatoes in massive brown bags. Cucumbers split from the heat were as long as my arms. Do the crickets sound loud to you he asked and I said no. Am I going to get saved from this he asked and I said no. You want love, I’ll give you love. The black cat I hit on my way to his sister’s house kept running after I hit it although I hit it straight on going sixty. That’s a sound that requires a space in your flesh, to forget. We set up his tent in his sister’s yard and there were more stars than I’ve seen in a long time but not as many as I’ve ever seen, not that many. Stay awake he said after I’d taken his sedative and I told him about the castle that was a prison and how next to it in the summer the whole town comes out to watch movies in black plastic chairs. His eyes were wrong. They had the sadness of an animal. You know, warm like that, and still running even afterward and at the same pace. I didn’t stop the car because I didn’t want to have to touch its fur. Stay awake all night and talk to me. Inside the house his sister’s two children slept in a room below their parents. A family intact as a snakeskin cast off from the body. Weight of the air but that density, rooted and linked, of their each of them sleeping. We wished for the names of the flint-pitched birds while I put my hand on your beard which was wire and on your hand which was a cluster of grapes and on your chest which went on for so long. You are always someone else. My blue balloon, my funny friend, my walkabout through palm trees. How will you narrate what is happening now he asked as he drew and then changed and then canceled the lines of my body. And that was almost everything I wanted. Come, my warm trouble, my good metal bowl. I’ll stay awake all night. For a little while. I don’t know how she died. Come into me.