Made to Order

Encourage, . . . Peradventure etymology?
Endocrinology is apt contextually,
hopefully.

You know something’s there when you feel
what you can’t see before you can then
because it shows.

You were saying: You can do it,
you already showed you could . . .
keep going.

We were driving around, well you were.
They had my cabaret license,
now take the other . . .

We were thinking of words like notes.
What’s minor sounds like coming up
from under,

majors were already there, like white keys
but sharps or flats are black
like words.

I coulda asked Nellie to come.
She likes the sun more than me.
The sun was shining when I was born.

Who started this? all the nonsense
meaning, Look it up and hope
the word fits,

like playing before and after turning
in your usual circles
to feel what you could hear

if you go back and play some more,
so you do,
it doesn’t sound like anything means

more than keeping time.
You lay down the beat, find the rhythm,
let me do melody.

This’s been your primer on origins, now pull
over, I want to tell you what
Gus said:

It was a golden and sunny Southern California
afternoon, and with the top down
Monk and Diz were driving along the coast.

"It’s always night," Monk said,
"because it is only light when the sun’s up."
Addressed to no one in particular.

Diz looked at him for a moment.
"Monk.
You are a deep cat."

(italicized passage courtesy of Gus Blaisdell [1935–2003],
"Lewis Baltz: Buried Silk Exhumed,"
Artspace: A Magazine of Contemporary Art, May/June 1992)

(27 May 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander