Michael Collins
Nobody writes about it. Not really.
Scour the world's libraries and you'll
find a few paragraphs; or on the internet,
fighting your way through languages and headlines,
through porn sites, through trillions of thoughts,
you'll find a little news of it scattered like a fistful
of spores—one writer remarks on
Redman's arrangement, his falsetto,
his double entendre; another traces
two notes to a tune about women
without drawers; but no one
yet has shut off his phone, canceled
his wedding, driven his mother over
to his brother's house, and moved in
with the thing. Wynton transcribed it,
yes he did; Wynton played its
echo more than once. But where
are his volumes on each separate note,
where his appendix on the secret
code of Satchmo's vibratos? For almost
a century, everyone turned away,
thinking they knew—as if someone wrote
about the full moon lifting an ocean's skirts
and the bird-loud noon the next day
and the mountain's shadow cooling the houses
of the poor, and the sudden cold snap
seizing the lowlands with white fingers—
as if someone wrote about all that
and never once mentioned the sun.
Yes. Nobody writes about it. . . . All right, people
mention it. One liner noter writes of
the solo's grave first notes, gestures
at the way Satch's arpeggios opened history
no one had yet set foot in—the way,
half way up the upper register, Redman finally
gave up the falsetto and the double entendre, caught
in his own awe. But nobody writes about
all that, not really. Nobody trains his whole
brain on it—as if someone wrote a long book
about the nails and the cross and Barabbas
weeping and rubbing the cramps out
of his legs, and never once mentioned
Jesus crying out, abandoned by God.