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Al Young’s monthly poem at KQED’s ‘The California Report’

ADVISORY | The texts of poems posted at KQED’s link may not always reflect purposeful line breaks

A MAY TO WARM THE BORDERLANDS

When May warms up our borderlands, Oregon oozes
Shakespeare. Arizona, México, Nevada — they smile,
re-chill, then heat back up all funny. The miles you jog
in El Cajón won’t feel the same in Truckee, El Centro,
Nevada City, Douglas City, Culver City, Lodi, or Taft.

High on May, California travelers, all stone, petrified,
just come down from races up hills and races up
mountains — 880, 680, 580, 280, 101, I-5, all One –
dig into California’s DNA and clink! Hey! May!
Broken out in code and sequences, present-day May

speaks up, shouts out, says: “Look deep, reach far
into my vacillating light. Feel my Gold Rush heat
and whorl. Forget about a merry month, sipped wine.
May knows far more than one hot mind can store.
Consider May in brisk Bodega Bay, or borderline L.A.”

– Al Young

©2012

• Where to find ‘The California Report’

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Visit Al Young’s Poem-a-Month page at KQED’s
‘The California Report’

butterflypictures.net

April, the Coolest Month

April? The cruelest month? Says who?
From Chula Vista to Bakersfield – she drove up
to the San Joaquin Valley to hear him quote this?
What was it about reading and college anyway?
“Fool,” she ached to say, “just look out the window.
Your A-plus blacks out sunlight!” Breathe.
She knew how April fools, but April pulls, too.

April pulls up National Poetry Month. Breathe.
April pulls up National Library Week and (bass
and drum roll) Jazz Appreciation Month.
Lobbies buzz. With every spore afloat, adrift,
ravishing her sinuses, she could feel April’s
mutual pulls flow out in her snail-soft exhale.
Her family knows beet fields, artichokes, grapes.

She breathed the early pull of April, a soul of melt
and yearly turn-around. Unsprung, they kissed
away distance and loved it up for lost time.
All the way home to green, old San Diego County,
she missed him bad. She made up poems
to sing for them over a crackling SmartPhone
in the twilit chill of April, the coolest month.

© Al Young

Courtesy photos

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©  Life

Actress Ava Gardner in Hollywood nightclub, 1948, wearing beret, horn-rimmed spectacles, and simulating a goatee, to signify admiration of Dizzy Gillespie, Bebop King.

AVA, SHE WAS ONE OF YOUR WOMEN

An MGM property, as she later stated,
“None of us was ever very well educated.”
For one hundred bucks a week each,
the studio knew it could afford to reach
deep into future space for its heroines, its stars.
You can talk about your Hedy Lamarrs,
your Lanas, your Grables, your Ritas, your Janes,
but none of those well-screened women sustains
your interest the crazy way into Ava Garner
did and still does. Ava was your partner–
no satiny matinee idolatress, either.
She called the hot and heavy breather
in new. Sexual, intellectual, aristocratic,
she truly you woofully into the ecstatic,
where feeling and thought, like energy and mass,
squared up, imploded; imagination, class,
were everything; knowledge of way-station.
She filled in the blanks for you. Your education
old as much to The Snows of Kilimanjaro
as it did to the steamy straight-and-narrow that
contessas didn’t walk barefoot. With Artie Shaw
Ava learned how great books worked. She saw
how what you hear and see and say and feel
gross deep when you and you alone get real.
Ideas? You had to bounce them, see which way
they fell into your world. Ava moved to Spain
and then to London, where the supple pain
of being a star, a ghost impression, slowed.
What was it about Ava that pulled and glowed,
that yanks and warms the eye and heart today
in a century she never reached to shrug away?

© Al Young

© Life

Teen-age girls, taken with Dizzy and his music in 1948, wait to have his autograph.

DEPRESSION, BLUES, FLAMENCO, WINE, DESPAIR

Depression, blues, flamenco, wine, despair––
sunk in, they make you cross your heart and die
for hope. Dark times come at you; they don’t care.
“So deal with this,” they say. And so you buy
the pain and stress, the restlessness––the works:
low back pain, makes and lamps, the twitch
I fear your face betrays.

ooooooooooooooooooooooJohn “Dizzy” Birks
Gillespie’s cheeks popped out (fat love an itch
scratched by the trumpet at his goateed lip),
they said: “Take chances, stretch, jump at the Sun.
You just can’t spend your whole life acting hip.
Be corny sometimes. Have yourself some fun.
You can’t be cool forever, so relax.”

Diz kneel puffed cheeks were anything but chic,
but when you close your eyes you heard him axe
infinitives, split atoms, hairs. You speak
fat tong––curves, flatlands, all of it. You do.

You understand that the hoodoo stab of hurt;
the blues, their messy messages, a few
trashed hopes, some lame goodbyes, her skirt,
your coat, the folded jeans, wet tights. Black night
is falling all around you in the rain.
Dark times, dark times can fix you in the light
of reason, recognition, lasers, pain.

© Al Young

— from Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2007)

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“April in Paris” — Sarah Vaughan (singer), Clifford Brown (trumpet), Herbie Mann (flute), Paul Quinichette (tenor saxophone), Jimmy Jones (piano), Joe Benjamin (bass), Roy Haynes (drums), 1954

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click on the eiffel tower

JJWebb/Cruzio Blues Café

To animate the avatar of Al Young reading and singing with the Dartanyan Brown Trio, click here.
Dartanyan Brown, bass | Jorge Molina, piano | Sly Randolph, drums

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APRIL IN PARIS

after Yip Harburg & Vernon Duke

It was here in that one-time, one-step, lighted blue
of Paris at ease, close to the Cluny, in splendid,
straight-up noontime shadow that your slow and
measuring eyes met more than their burning match.

The smooth warmth of your whisper along my neck,
the nappy back of it, where you’d peeled back
its soft, excited collar to tell me everything you’d learned
or discerned in a city where love and prices flirt.

A product of standstill winters, sudden summers, sultry
prejudice, and heartland steak-and-whiskey afternoons,
you’d blown in from the States, an orphan of the arts –
Mary Cassatt, Josephine Baker, Mary Lou Williams,

Jean Seberg. What breathlessness overtakes me here?
Brushing and combing out memories of your touch,
in a season as uncertain as coastal fog moving inland
from the loveless edges of that country we’d both fled,

I shiver. Whom could we run to if not one another?
Back home we knew what it was like to be the other –
displaced, despised, imprisonable. We watched and fought.
The colors of loss deepened. Yearning to break free,

unconsciously American, we counted our chickens, certain
that the ships we’d always banked on would sail in.
In Paris, our adopted country of each other’s arms,
whose borders blurred all time, all common market sense,

we saved the slow but steady squeeze of night, of time,
the way it smothered darkness, the way it mothered light.
The April of your frightened French was like that, too;
you had no words for holiday tables, for chestnuts in bloom.

Parisian light, like light at home — Detroit, Des Moines –
lit up your waifish eyes. I said, “Think twice before you speak.”
Over here you mostly knew the blues; rue rhymed with blue.
There couldn’t be too much light, too much touch.

Al Young
© 2001, 2006, 2008 by Al Young

Meet the Poet-Animator

Animation and design
© 2008 by J.J. Webb a.k.a. Beau Blue

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clickable

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furiouscinema.com

Listen to Al Young’s March 2012 poem for KQED’s ‘The California Report’

DID SHE WHO MADE THE LAMB
MAKE THE MGM LION, TOO?

© Al Young

© Marek Fijalkowski

Courtesy mysweetcherryblossom.blogspot.com

HOW THE RAINBOW WORKS

for Jean Cook, on learning of her mother’s death

Mostly we occupy ocular zones, clinging
only to what we think we can see.
We can’t see wind or waves of thought,
electrical fields or atoms dancing;
only what they do or make us believe.

Look on all of life as color—­
vibratile movement, heart-centered,
from invisibility to the merely visible.
Never mind what happens when one of us dies.
Where are you before you even get born?
Where am I and all the unseeable souls
we love at this moment, or loathed
before birth? Where are we right now?

Everything that ever happened either
never did or always will with variations.
Let’s put it another way: Nothing ever
happened that wasn’t dreamed, that wasn’t
sketched from the start with artful surprises.
Think of the dreamer as God, a painter,
a ham, to be sure, but a divine old master
whose medium is light and who sidesteps
tedium by leaving room both inside and outside
this picture for subjects and scenery to wing it.

Look on death as living color too: the dyeing
of fabric, submersion into a temporary sea,
a spectruming beyond the reach of sensual
range which, like time, is chained to change;
the strange notion that everything we’ve
ever done or been up until now is past
history, is gone away, is bleached, bereft,
perfect, leaving the scene clean to freshen
with pigment and space and leftover light.

© Al Young
— from HEAVEN: Collected Poems 1956-1990

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© Karen Johnson

Backstage of My Song, an evening with Harry Belafonte, a KPFA benefit held on the 30th of November at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church

BELAFONTE FOR BEGINNERS

Three years before “I Have a Dream” got preached,

the 1960 March on Washington

propelled us into DC. Once we reached

the Saturday when you were going on,

mean horseback cops reared up to stomp us. “Stop!”

one hollered in a trembling southern drawl.

“Let them kids live!” We thanked this rebel cop

with gut sighs, then we cut straight for the Mall.

You, Harry Belafonte, sang our songs.

You let us know you came down on our side.

Green college kids, we knew what rights, what wrongs

forced us to see you, hear you, while we died.

No caving in. No turning back. Just home.

Calypso? All we heard was: “Daylight, come!“

–Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

When she explained how she was set free

but her boyfriend and best friend weren’t

(“I don’t know what it was about him and her

and I”), you loathe the fool who would collar

her and say: “About him and her and me!”

So you shine it on, the same as you’ve given up

whom and less and fewer and good and well

and was and were as in If I Were a Bell (not

If I Was a Bell) I’d go “Ding-dong-ding-dong, ding!”

Well, look at where you’re coming from:

the grammar Nazi who knows subjunctive mode

(or, better yet, mood), knows indirect object

pronouns, verb-needy nouns, lie, lay, laid, lain.

You know its and it’s and neither, nor, further

farther, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.”

Besides, she’s younger than you. Bitten, mother

tongue suffers. Language, gauged and negotiated,

sends thumbs fumbling and twirling unjustly.

She compares and contrasts sweethearts and cohorts.

You feel their pain and her shame. You lighten up.

– Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

© vozamer

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Courtesy Tissa Eddy Stein, Roger Eddy, Glen Eddy

In memory of Edith Eddy | 23 July 1919- 3 January 2011

Light-years ago: Chapala afternoons,
a lake-like feel and smell, the way we met,
three children California-born, full moons,
the world not yet as gone as it would get.

Lifetimes ago: Kauai, Sri Lanka, France,
the U.K., Switzerland and Italy,
the island of Madeira, China. Once
upon a time you told all this to me.

You grew up in these places, went to school,
learned languages, then found the U.S.A.
Your sisters didn’t follow. You, uncool,
fell fast and hard in love, and there you’d stay.

But all too soon your voice, an earthy purr,
wore down. Still, where your love took root, you star.

– Al Young

© 2011 by Al Young

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Taylor Trio

for Nana

What’s most fantastical almost always goes

unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.

Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee

your night, creameries your dream factories.

Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest

means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave

of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth

can still be the same earth our ancestors walked.

Chemistry strains to connect our hemispheres.

The right and left sidelines our brain forms

in the rain this new world braves—acid jazz.

The timeless taste her tongue leaves in your mouth,

stirred with unmeasured sugars, greens the day

the way sweet sunlight oxygenates, ignites

all nights, all daytimes, and you—this jumps.

Sheer voltage leaps, but nothing keeps or stays.

Sequence your afternoon as dance. Drink spring.

Holding her hard against you, picture the screenplay.

Take time to remember to get her spells together.

Up jumps the goddess gratified, and up jumped spring.

– Al Young
from Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006

© 2006 by Al Young

Spring Awakening |© John Fleshman

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Gini Savage’s Shape-Shifter | © Al Young

Bluebirds Bathing | © Vivian Torrence

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