Granite from Sugar Water

On "Purple Shades," to Johnny Griffin's sax,
Monk plays percussively, stabbing at the keys
as Hardman's trumpet hesitates — the ironic ash
recognizing the loss accomplished — then comes

back in on the beat, and there is nowhere else
to go but on, filling in the gaps, lifting the inartic-
ulatenesses, the way the small brown birds lift,
not to abandon something, but to own it, here

on the bark, there, sensed somehow, almost
unperceived, surely not by the antennae nerves
inside the ear, blood blowing across the synapse.
You're the kid with his lips pursed at the mouth

of a bottle sweating cold, leaning back one of those
kinds of chairs a handler jabs at a lion when, peevish,
it strikes out, the way a trombone goes out and back,
out and back, though, in this number, there surely is

no slide to slide, so you have to be vigilant when you
suck the air, distrust raised to art, the way mercury salts
the gills of garfish hovering against a current that ought
to be able to sweep everything out of sight, but doesn't,

can't, those sheaths of cartilage flexing, working hard
to simulate stillness, Monk's missing note, a seventh,
suspending the taste of the imminent, suspending breath,
though the end is on its way sure as everything resists it.

Richard Lyons
Crab Orchard Review
Volume 11, Number 1
Winter/Spring 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Crab Orchard Review.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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