Since you have to start and end with something,
make it sound: the sound of toffee-colored
alto sax riffs sliding off hotcakes, trumpets
keening crushed ice and java, pianos spraying
barbs of fire over a tough skeleton of drums.
Blend in verbena and mint from Southern nights,
Octover moon dipped in satin-melt, fish
silvering to the surface to whisper whole notes,
quivering the lunar smear on rumpled black water.
Tone it with chiffon, warm clay, blue steel,
malleable, infallible, indelible. Pour it
in the revved-up engine driving the solar machine.

Since you have to call it something, call it jazz,
Gershwin style, Charlie-Bird, Duke and Doc style.
Everything else insinuating into your ears,
your years, is unsound noise. Jazz comes together
as something you can move to, sit still to, kiss to,
milk cows to. You can heal to jazz, die to it
when the time comes, easy-smiling like my Uncle Hal.

One note attracts another, forms a spiral
like human cells, connects a cadence. Somebody
invented things to blow and beat, bow and strum,
concentrating they layers you can hear—never mind
those you can't or those secret increments
of after-pulse you can't quite feel,
all lending vibes to the parts you can.

Jazz harmonizes snow, lightning, gin, Jello,
a lemon look that says leave, a laugh that says love.
Some passages sing tears, ache-to-the-bone,
write-a-psalm tones or melon-sweet, sass-hot measures
rolling off tongues before they smoke. Jazz
never loses its cool, always finds that one space
you can't close off, winds through your vents,
your veins, firing synapses along the way,
a synopsis of your life.

—Glenna Holloway
SENSATIONS MAGAZINE, 2001