Eric Dolphy’s Avowal*
Eric Dolphy’s alto is less a solo than an announcement:
not unlike a boisterous child acting out in the rear pew,
where everyone gradually comprehends, he is speaking
in tongues, and more, God is real—and these sounds,
typically unintelligible to human ears, are understood
as ineludible revelation: insistent, ablaze, redemptory.
(*“We Speak” is the opening track from trumpeter Booker Little’s hard bop masterpiece Out Front, from 1961, which teamed him up with multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy; both musicians would be dead within three years.)
This poem appears in my new collection Rhapsodies in Blue.
More about Eric Dolphy (from my first collection The Blackened Blues):
Eric Dolphy’s Death
If ever there was a time for some Deus ex machina
it was there, in that alley; angels instead of uniforms
finding you, half-asleep—on your way somewhere else.
But perhaps sacred spirits don’t intervene in the affairs
of their messengers, and there was nothing any of us stuck
here on earth—busy as ever not saving ourselves—could do.
More about Booker Little (also from The Blackened Blues):
Booker Little’s Deliverance
Your blood, poisoned by neither drink nor drugs,
but the ravening appetite of some fickle force
we can’t fathom; the way hearts attack us or else
our systems are assailed by cells made to invade.
At least fate had the courtesy to inquire if you had
any final words: your short life’s work summarized
on two albums that scorn mortality, even as death
circled your ailing body like a demented buzzard.
Strength and sanity, victory and sorrow—
calling softly: holding a lantern, showing
us some of what you were already seeing.
Was this expression—an elegiac storm still able
to inspire and console, capable of changing lives
half a century after it got stuck to magnetized tape;
just another day in the studio, that odd laboratory
of mournful miracles—worth all it took to make?
Those revelations transmitted from the impassive edge
of elsewhere, a place memory and deed are annihilated:
some insatiable absence of being where all sound ceases.
(Booker Little, a virtuosic composer and trumpet player, died tragically at 23 due to complications from uremia. Prolific during his abbreviated career, Little managed to lead two influential sessions in 1961, despite being in considerable and constant pain.)
