Two Poems:

Ghosts

He was filled with beauty, so filled he could not stop the shadows
from their walk around his horn, blasting cobwebs in the Fillmore's ceiling.

Somewhere dawn makes up for the night before, but he is floating.
Dead in the water. And yet, my lover tells me, he saw him shimmering.

As did others. It could have been the acid. Or fragmented harmonics.
His reed ancestral. This perilous knowledge. The band went home,

shivering. A girl threw roses in the water. Carnations, daisies. And bright red sashes.
Like ones the Chinese use for funeral banners. A drummer intoned chants

From the Orient. Police wrote up the news. Years later, my lover told me
Friends would hear the whisper, then a tone, full throttle from the wind.

Ghosts on Second Avenue, jazzmen in the falling stars.
If you catch one, your hands will glitter.

Belissima

What to make of the Zairian's virile smile?
No snake slithers with such style.
No cock crows as loudly and yet
when a whisper is needed,
his breath is as soft as an infant's cooing.

Belissima. Zouk music is as bright as day-
light above white white beaches
Oh yes, this is the way to sway
into the sweet singer's mirth

chorus responds in syncopation
to his commands. We join the harmonies
in words from a language
earthbound and utterly delicate.

As his mouth flames intoxication
Congolese rhythms, homesickness, and beauty's power
to disrupt,
the Chicago girls get wasted, somewhat
in the miracle of shadowed lust.

Zouk music in the snowbelt.
Sex on the beach

     for Deborah

Patricia Spears Jones
Femme du Monde
Tia Chucha Press

Copyright © 2006 by Patricia Spears Jones.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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