Post by MoonyLuna on Jan 25, 2009 12:13:37 GMT -5
1.
Before they were known as "Monk" and "Ammons"
they were just two down-east North Carolina kids
born poor on the wrong side of town, or on the farm,
who grew up tall and smart, with big strong hands
and a knack for playing hymns by ear on the pianos
in their mothers' churches, the soundtracks for Amens.
2.
Thelonious was a teen when he hit the gospel highway
as part of the house band backing a lady evangelist,
a family friend and faith healer named Reverend Graham
whose hard-charging nickname was "The Texas Warhorse."
They were on the road for several years, and all he said
about it was: "She preached and healed, and we played."
3.
Archie, eight years younger, played for local revivals
and services, a skinny Depression boy sowing seeds
of song, his red hair a soft flame over the keyboard.
Onboard in the South Pacific, in a Navy-gray chapel
on the other side of the world from Whiteville, he'd try
to tease hymns from pianos also always out of tune.
4.
Maybe they liked not being part of the congregation,
not having to go forward to be saved or healed.
Maybe they liked watching the pretty girls come down,
confessing, sobbing, praying, glistening with sweat.
Maybe they liked how even the crudest music and verses
could lift people out of themselves for a few minutes,
5.
putting them in touch with something truly exalted,
beyond notes or words yet wholly grounded in both
and in the body, in sweet feet and fingers and mouth.
Nearly half a century later, playing hymns on his upright
one chilly Ithaca fall night, Archie said, "This is where
my poetry comes from—forget that Transcendental shit!"
6.
Nobody pays much attention to the piano player
whose job is to listen to and watch the revival preacher
and keep each holy marathon moving steadily forward,
playing the white and black keys as if they were souls
trapped in flesh moving toward a much-desired climax,
never losing the urgent heartbeat or halting the flow
7.
of foursquare song unless the gesturing evangelist
needs a dramatic pause to drive God's message home
to sinners who must choose heaven or hell tonight,
for now is the appointed hour, even so come Lord Jesus,
the pianist's poised hands waiting to undertake
their pilgrimage to an earthly paradise far from here.
8.
"Sphere" may seem like a middle name he made up
to sound more hip, but Thelonious inherited it,
his mother's father's first name and her middle one,
its nothing-square-about-it jazzy 3-D geometry
rooted in the family genealogy in Rocky Mount,
a town (despite its name) nowhere near real mountains.
9.
"Randolph" was a bland middle name, like most are:
the poet in print went initialed, as stalwart A.R.,
though everybody called him 'Archie" in person.
He did name one poem Sphere, a book-length sentence
linked by colons as Monk's tunes hinge on silences,
the music of the bluegreen planets that never cease moving.
10.
Monk stops pounding the piano in Straight, No Chaser,
rises from his bench again and starts spinning slowly
in a mute dance that could be ecstasy or madness,
a dizzy evangelist (eyes closed, listening to the spirit)
who believes that you must save yourself first and last,
convert your being to an emptied brimming space.
11.
Ammons strides down the long tall hall to class.
He knows that he must, yet again, tell his students
not to use the tired old word "God" in their poems
but he also knows that every poem is a kind of hymn
to the human urge to craft the holiest language,
as every hymn is a song of praise to itself, to words
12.
and music creating worlds that others can also enter,
and be moved by, and love, and remember, even once
the psalmists return to dust, their hands no longer
moving over ready keys, their names nothing more
than faded letters on spines, though what they made
lives on in the air, in their lines scoring page after page.
Copyright
Michael McFee
Before they were known as "Monk" and "Ammons"
they were just two down-east North Carolina kids
born poor on the wrong side of town, or on the farm,
who grew up tall and smart, with big strong hands
and a knack for playing hymns by ear on the pianos
in their mothers' churches, the soundtracks for Amens.
2.
Thelonious was a teen when he hit the gospel highway
as part of the house band backing a lady evangelist,
a family friend and faith healer named Reverend Graham
whose hard-charging nickname was "The Texas Warhorse."
They were on the road for several years, and all he said
about it was: "She preached and healed, and we played."
3.
Archie, eight years younger, played for local revivals
and services, a skinny Depression boy sowing seeds
of song, his red hair a soft flame over the keyboard.
Onboard in the South Pacific, in a Navy-gray chapel
on the other side of the world from Whiteville, he'd try
to tease hymns from pianos also always out of tune.
4.
Maybe they liked not being part of the congregation,
not having to go forward to be saved or healed.
Maybe they liked watching the pretty girls come down,
confessing, sobbing, praying, glistening with sweat.
Maybe they liked how even the crudest music and verses
could lift people out of themselves for a few minutes,
5.
putting them in touch with something truly exalted,
beyond notes or words yet wholly grounded in both
and in the body, in sweet feet and fingers and mouth.
Nearly half a century later, playing hymns on his upright
one chilly Ithaca fall night, Archie said, "This is where
my poetry comes from—forget that Transcendental shit!"
6.
Nobody pays much attention to the piano player
whose job is to listen to and watch the revival preacher
and keep each holy marathon moving steadily forward,
playing the white and black keys as if they were souls
trapped in flesh moving toward a much-desired climax,
never losing the urgent heartbeat or halting the flow
7.
of foursquare song unless the gesturing evangelist
needs a dramatic pause to drive God's message home
to sinners who must choose heaven or hell tonight,
for now is the appointed hour, even so come Lord Jesus,
the pianist's poised hands waiting to undertake
their pilgrimage to an earthly paradise far from here.
8.
"Sphere" may seem like a middle name he made up
to sound more hip, but Thelonious inherited it,
his mother's father's first name and her middle one,
its nothing-square-about-it jazzy 3-D geometry
rooted in the family genealogy in Rocky Mount,
a town (despite its name) nowhere near real mountains.
9.
"Randolph" was a bland middle name, like most are:
the poet in print went initialed, as stalwart A.R.,
though everybody called him 'Archie" in person.
He did name one poem Sphere, a book-length sentence
linked by colons as Monk's tunes hinge on silences,
the music of the bluegreen planets that never cease moving.
10.
Monk stops pounding the piano in Straight, No Chaser,
rises from his bench again and starts spinning slowly
in a mute dance that could be ecstasy or madness,
a dizzy evangelist (eyes closed, listening to the spirit)
who believes that you must save yourself first and last,
convert your being to an emptied brimming space.
11.
Ammons strides down the long tall hall to class.
He knows that he must, yet again, tell his students
not to use the tired old word "God" in their poems
but he also knows that every poem is a kind of hymn
to the human urge to craft the holiest language,
as every hymn is a song of praise to itself, to words
12.
and music creating worlds that others can also enter,
and be moved by, and love, and remember, even once
the psalmists return to dust, their hands no longer
moving over ready keys, their names nothing more
than faded letters on spines, though what they made
lives on in the air, in their lines scoring page after page.
Copyright
Michael McFee