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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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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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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?

Did she who made the lamb make the MGM lion, too?

No Hollywood hurrah, no roar, no Big Sur purr

can coolly calm or claim you, whether for weeks

or days or nights you blow cold or warm or you blow

wet or hot or not at all. Tell us now, will you tango?

Will you waltz? Will you boogie? Will you guaguancó?

Will you even dance? Or just throw down and march?

Marshlands of the Golden State, all you ancient,

mushy wetlands — baylands, swamps, marshes,

bogs; lungs of our coastlines, raw river- and lake-

and creek-sweetening filters — unite! You’ve still got

plenty to lose. From Long Beach to Fremont

to Arcata, Sacramento and Sheep Ranch on up

to the Great Washoe Basin, you’d better watch yourselves.

In the run-off and run-up to spring anything goes.

© Al Young

© Marek Fijalkowski

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