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(top) Still from the USSR film Solaris (1972); directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
(bottom) Don Quijote y Sancho Panza image courtesy el blog de LeeTamargo

SOLARIS

“Science — nonsense! We don’t want to conquer space at all; we want to expand earth endlessly. We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror.”
– Dialogue spoken by Snouth in the Soviet film, Solaris (based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem)

Explore earth evidently, rock by rock, root by root,
inch by inch, hair by hair, pixel by pixel, tock by tock.
There was a way once to get back; not to get even,
but to reach home without leaving the body.
Imagine the unsounded but fully heard voice
that clumps up within you, that fluffs into a hunch,
silver every time. If intimacy lit up like this,
all holiness could be speared and stuffed and mounted.
Thank God for invisibility, for the untraceable
trails we sink in, marking our journeys in electrical ink
upon mental score paper that reads us perfectly.
That thoughts are things is all the faith we need.
To think pure beauty, have it turn up in your arms
or at your feet or on your bourgeois walls means
business. To slow time down until the space between
moments stretches beyond the hours means eternity.
Unworldly gospel people who lean into the clouds
look for that uncloudy day. To others, matter matters,
nothing else, and business is business. Explore?

– Al Young

from The Sound of Dreams Remembered
© 2001 and 2006 by Al Young

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“Dear me. Think of it! Niggers speaking French.”
– William Jennings Bryan,
U.S. Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson

Caribbean culture this and Caribbean Studies that –
you lecture on these from notes so yellow with yesses
and yesterdays, who couldn’t help wondering
if your history hasn’t been ripped from the pages
of some other book? Maybe the double-book account
Columbus kept: one for the crew, one for himself,
the freighted version more truth than myth.

“What, My Lai?” the joke went after Lt. William Calley
and his GI marauders murdered most of a village
in a Vietnam your students still can’t locate.
Can they point out Port-au-Prince? Can they
unearth Haiti from a sea of island nations
set up as plantations to grow cash and more cash
and more cash? Unlike her Kerouacs, the Arawak
Indians stood little chance in mappable America.

Spaniards gave up and seeded the eastern half
of Hispaniola. Deft and slick, the French moved in
with African slaves to colonize the isle’s western
Left Bank. Tobacco, cacao, coffee, sugar, sugar
(azúcar up the kazoo) – all the dope your belly
can stomach, and all the cotton Europa needed.
This business of cheapness, this business of woe.

That nature is “niggardly” in her provisions
isn’t what Adam Smith intended to say or convey
in The Wealth of Nations. All Smith meant was:
To make a profit, you need a nigger. To make big
profits, you need a whole lot of niggers speaking
English or  Dutch, speaking Spanish, speaking
Portuguese, German, Danish, Norwegian, Italian,
until inch by inch, you reached your French,
your Martinique, your Sénégal, your Ivory Coast,
your Equatorial, your Montréal, blesséd Québec,
La Nouvelle-Orléans, Louisiane. Toussaint L’Ouverture
– a  slave, self-taught and black as Miles at midnight;
blue-black, fearless, smart, an anti-body for a bruise:
it was stealth versus wealth. It was ancestral starlight
guiding a ship; it was paycheck loan time for Napoléon.
“We’ll give you $7 million dollars for all the Louisiana
you can pony up.” “I’ll take it,” said Napoléon, “in cash.”
Those Negroes in Haiti were kicking his ass. But how?

Word reached George Washington, who all but said:
France helped us joog and jam King George, so
we’ll send spare troops to beat back your insurgents,
only don’t let word of this get out to our slaves.
Hell could break loose! Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité –
inspire us some more. Ayiti, Hayti, Haiti blossomed
step by step in living, lifelong color. Port-au-Prince
could never hold a candle to Paris and Washington:
slash-and burn croppers of dreaming human cargo.

You know all this, you teach and earn your keep
with such detail. You know the Arawak would not
sit back and wait for such an earth attack to build
and seethe. The French and Spaniards didn’t care.
The king and queen were going to get their cut
no matter what: one-third of all the booty, all the loot.
With greed and pride now supersized — colonize!

– Al Young
© 2010 Al Young

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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

Animation and design
© 2008 by J.J. Webb

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TravelPhotoGallery, Paris

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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

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Gini Savage’s Shape-Shifter |  Photo: Al Young

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Courtesy photo

Rhymes with phone or moan and

means: I’ve grown so dense and lazy

I can’t even be bothered to bomb you

personally, so I dispatch a robot to rob you,

relieve you of everything you thought

rightful or yours. Rhymes with snores.

– Al Young

© 2010 by Al Young

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in memory of Andrea Lewis, 1957-2009

With no away, you can’t get lost or drown.
You can’t just disappear; you’re trapped right here.
This sticky, spidery web still holds its own.
What does it mean when we think far or near?

What do we do when we throw stuff away?
What happens when we flush? What follows what?
The other ends of dreams unfold. You stay
in place, right where you are, yes, you stay put –

or so you think. Imagine how the sun
felt back in feudal days, when we assumed
our earth was flat. Imagine everyone
asleep in such belief. What insight bloomed,

what twilight rose to open people’s eyes?
“I’m up here moving, folks,” the sun might feel.
“How long before you Christians realize
there’s more than gold that shines? Light shines for real.”

And where does sunlight go? What does it do?
Light feeds each breath we take, light circulates
and in its round-and-round produces you
and me and everything that jumps or waits.

Away, away, away — what does it mean?
To fly away means sailing out of sight,
but who or what is racing from whose scene?
Perspective reigns. Day never knows it’s night.

— Al Young

© 2009 by Al Young

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© Al Young

The falling chill of light on flower and fruit;

the sound and feel of it October’s,

November’s. Their slowing hushes

warm shadows of whisper and touch

— ch, ch, ch — shhhhhhhh

– Al Young

© 2009 Al Young

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On another October day when heat raged
in San Francisco and home-eating fires
attacked Southern California, you, in love again,
stepped out into the glory of another afternoon.

Clutched in the utterly solar caress
of this endless embrace, you saw yourself.
In everyone you greeted or benignly ignored
you saw the same unending birth of light
die on daylight savings time. You saw
the steps you’d have to take to move
from momentariness back into eternity.

You wandered into this dwindling October,
where you’ve dwelled for ages. Eternity
and maternity share more than earth-
churning cycles; both turn on the moment
just ended. Each spins on the moment just begun.

Never out of step, advancing Pied Piper style,
her slowing march on winter made a rat out of you.
Almost over now, October spread herself
across the landscape, cocksure of getting over.

As warming to the eye as to your touch, October,
moreover, no stranger to the flash and shimmer
of gold and burnt sienna, red and sunburst
green, October reminded. “Time may have
a stop,” she said, “but life does not. Life goes.”
And at her gung-ho go-away party, you hoisted
your glass: “To moist October, quencher of flame.”

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

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In memory of Michael McGettigan
(1956-2009)

Where does it say you have to play your cards
the way you played your horn? Where did it say
the road you’d walk would shrink to miles and yards
of first-class golf course holes up in Coos Bay?

I knew you when you spoke to me of songs
and dreams. Leave California. Settle down.
New Orleans was the place. A sad heart longs
to beat a whole new way — you heard its sound.

You played it all by ear, threw down your heart,
bartended nights; by day you owned the club.
Golf kept the wolf at bay. Golf let you start
again from scratch each day. Was this the rub?

Since when can’t life be one big hole-in-one?
Where did it say your hurt was yours alone?

– Al Young

© 2009 Al Young

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Swee: “Rainstorm”  |  © Malaysian Watercolours

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Overhearing her peppery, gray-eyed cry of “Get off my ass!”
– part gringo, part Mexico — you guess she’s undressing,
addressing her boyfriend, her partner, her lover, her spouse;
stranded, winded; all of us hostages to this gangster storm.

Your translation, flawless in any lingo: “Hey, lighten up!”
All space between spaces softens; you clearly hear the fridge,
its on-off friendliness, the binary push-pull of life and lull.
the way the full love-hate, pass-fail, love-leave yin-yang swings.

Parked (maybe arked) till morning in our sudden, rain-bashed
no-star motel — no wireless, no email, no female connection –
alone with ticking blood and heart-swept buds, you flower,
renewing your lifetime membership in Club One Another.

– Al Young
Antioch, CA
May Day 2009

© 2009 by Al Young

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