Garin Cycholl works as co-editor of Near South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction, and drama. He is author of the prose collection Nightbirds (moria books, 2006), Blue Mound to 161, a book-length poem on geological and historical displacements in Southern Illinois (Pavement Saw Press 2005) and Rafetown Georgics ( Cracked Slab Books, Chicago, 2008)
Blues—Silences—Stops Between
for Sterling Plumpp
Guys play it off, circle the square. It's
the man born in
American sound that's remembered. What
happened to space—
Arkansas adding a kind of running finger
piano. Geography—bad
gospels, exploration, and no mercies. Western
woman running the sun
like a tomahawk. But you and I could get into
the sound's space—something
that sounded like the feeling I had when the land
was running out the blood.
It was hell, large and becoming a people, their
triumphs are muscled jet. Ahab
was no beginning, no barrier to the command of
one story. You wrote
five bars of road—a stretch of earth, half sea, half
land—a high ride on such space.
ii. "On Green Dolphin Street"
like a piano heard over the pay-
phone from Sutherland's that
kind of stretched out sound all
those ears looking for space
how many times it escaped thru
a crack in the wall—the piano
had it right—trading riffs of the
sound relenting, leaving mythy
spaces why every blues is a
walking blues your sound's edge
against it, stillness staking its
places across broken measures
how did you hear them? trading
silences with Miles riffing and
riffing your name thru Mississippi,
Chicago, the stops between
iii. "Blue in Green"
the sound that's plucked or the sound that's blown
the myth in the fingertips, the blues in the howl
the sharp lip of a bloom, the horn's rolled bell
how sound fills a terrain or a room on S. Indiana
the old man on drums, the young one on trumpet
the blue in the green or the green in the blue some-
thing about walking on hardened feet, long song
iv. "Bitches Brew"
This is a con-
certo, right? a
fugue or a mo-
tif we bounced
footnotes or chop
suey blues a coil
revelry get up get
up get up the horn's
a memory organ
improvising what
it can't recall tre-
ading the next solo
no Mississippi dol-
drums but smoke
's shadow on a
canvass wall