Late summer had toasted the grass and weeds, But in the field I found a dandelion ghost, A perfectly spherical puffball of a hundred seeds. I pinched it off and huffed and watched the seeds coast On the random eddies, out, out from my breath Over the exhausted field, like paratroops let from a plane Descending on a placid country not expecting death Or life to visit in such sudden,
Tuck your chin in, brother, don’t look up, Ball up your hands in your pockets, pal, The Hawk is out, the definite Hawk, and Don’t look up, no, don’t look up, Keep that chin tucked in, ‘Cause when that lake black wind Scuts those last year, long ago leaves up Clark Street And they’re twisting on the corner like a dog pack snapping, Yeah, snapping at its own tail, Yeah,
The road is rutted sand through scrubby jack pines, sucking clay that weights the feet, sunstruck tar that reaches after every step, or merciless concrete. No matter, they must run, zigzagging crazily as they can, the bullets raising holes behind them. They can tuck and roll into any ditch they please – one plane barrels over but another one is always there to raise them up running again on their
In 1982, I went to work with my friend Dave hauling trash, using a 1950s International truck, a classic old 1-ton, open-bed pickup. Somehow Dave became our estimator, despite being A. legally blind and B. pathologically reluctant to wear his glasses. This made for some interesting if unremunerative estimates, and we often wound up working entire days or more for forty dollars. One revolting job we took on involved cleaning
Starting with my dad, people have been telling me to Stand Up Straight all my life. He told me. The Army told me. My friends told me, and probably a few enemies. No one ever told me how, until last year, when my chiropractor was moved to show me a little exercise in which I stood with my back against a wall, heels pressing against the baseboard, back of my
Much jazz writing has proceeded from the Great Man theory of history. If you’re trying to fashion a narrative, it’s a convenient theory. Buddy Bolden begat King Oliver begat Louis Armstrong begat Roy Eldridge begat Dizzy Gillespie; Bix Beiderbecke begat Bobby Hackett begat Chet Baker. And so on. These trains of influence are supportable to a point, and allow for a coherent story to be told about the development of
