OPTIONAL POETRY

In true poet fashion didn’t really follow the prompt of using five random song titles, but did a thing where I worked some of Chet Baker’s titles and lyrics into a poem about him.  He fell to his death from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988:

A slow note, sad, not of this earth,
a pure tone getting lost around
the corners of the night.

You fell in love just once, foolish man,
fell so terribly hard you lost your teeth
but not your voice – and you can bet
your life it rains.

Turning back, they wanted you to climb
seven neat steps up the scale, to heaven—
the smoke and the stage and the night and the note.
But your heaven was in your veins.
It had to be, with you.

You, who fell too easily, never
bending your pitch but your bones,
plenty, never looking before you jumped,
soaring like a broken wing, playing the hot
and heavy, lead-bellied you fell

so easily, so fast.

For all we know it was an accident–
everything happened to you.

Incomparable.

It will be the ocean that gets me
in the end, all and always the ocean
— kindly, with none of the biting hunger
of a breaking wave. I do not know
the body of water but it will be calm
as it often is at dusk.

I do not know the body of water
but the body of water knows me.
Even here far from the coast
it pulls on me like riptide
to return, return, return.

It will be calm, it may be dusk
along the Gulf when the oil rigs light up
one by one and sting rays slip shadows
past the sandbar, ghost crabs emerging
to write their own sideways lines.

I chose these as my witnesses:
Also of the ocean, also at home in the tides,
also tasked with returning and returning
as the red-globe sun falls below
the horizon with a sharp
green flash.