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The
Blue Note, 1996
for Larry
Levis
For lack of a car
I followed in your footsteps,
crushing the new snow between your old department
and the cigar store with the asthmatic Siamese cat,
brushing past forsythia icebound in its first bloom
and walking into the Blue Note, where a poster
of the Reverend Horton Heat was peeling away
from a concert announcement for Chuck Berry.
Inside, a recording of your voice was playing
but the audience kept drinking and talking
about their own lives. But soon those who knew you
got onstage and told their stories, repeating your words
as if you might remain a little in the language itself,
the way some stones that fall from the river cliffs
still have the shapes of shells, or we imitate
the ones we love not to mock them or steal from them,
but to bring them a little closer, to bask
for a moment in the illusion of their presence
after they have gone. So there I was at the Blue Note,
a bar where lonely people sought out others like them
and a music hall that took its name from a quarter tone
that has no symbol in traditional western music,
a ghost between two frets that gives some chords
an unresolvable tension, like remembering someone
whose name you can no longer bring yourself to say,
whom you once loved, while holding a stranger
in your arms. Then they played that tape of you again,
and maybe it was because the sound was too low
or because the stereo system was better than I thought,
but it seemed as though you were just offstage.
And I began to understand what I had already lost
without knowing it; the people I would meet too late
but might have loved; that love itself-sudden and soaring,
the note that brings the house down-becoming unsustainable.
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