Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Does anyone remember the Saturday night Sonny Stitt
dueled with Ammons on tenor at a dance hall on the East Side?
I could say those were the days, but in truth they were
no better and no worse than these. The musicians
were joyous, uncertain, young, playing their hearts out.
I was miserable, uncertain, young, working my ass off
for 3.25 an hour at Wyandotte Chemical, the worst work
I ever had. “At height” was the job description,
which managed to leave out the terror. I’d look down
to see the ground waiting to receive my body
as a religious object but without the attending women
to hold up my flattened head and keen over my passing.
Would the women in their long dresses have made
a difference? I suppose so. I was a romantic idiot
in love with the grand gestures I read about or saw
in post-war Italian cinema. Hell, I was twenty-three,
healthy, with a young man’s appetites and an old man’s future.
Sonny wasn’t much older than I, just out of the dry-up tank
at Lexington, clean, clear-eyed, leaning back to blow out
the unquenchable fire that burned within and never
succeeding. Of course I envied him. He was up there,
the star; I was alone too but anonymous among the teenagers
who’d come to dance and barely moved for hours, by turns
spellbound or fired up, just as I was. Together we beheld
ordinary human breath, stained with cigarettes and cognac,
transformed into melodies that vanished. Did I go back
to Wyandotte on Monday and--masked and gloved--climb
the stacks to survey the scarred world that stretched
all the way to Ohio? I can’t recall. I know I survived.
I know the musicians left before dawn for Flint. I can recall
the entire final solo Sonny took on “Body and Soul”,
how pure and warm the hard tone suddenly became,
how he slid slowly to the front of the stage to play
all of it a second tine, the hunched back bearing down,
the almond eyes closed up tight, each single note going out
over the bowed heads of the children, and how silent
we were as we filed out into the blackened street.
The streetcar on Joy Road never came and no one cared,
alone or in pairs we had entered music. We’re still there.