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Five Poems
by Matthew Thorburn


At the Angle Tree with Katrina
  
An Anglo bistro. Sweat-soaked. Six-ish. 
“Absolut?” Amstel Light. Midtown and then some,
and me just back from Michigan’s sore thumb.
One of the city-slick? I wish. No, nix wish—
 
crowded in with the dark suit, dark shirt, dark
tie crowd means no light cuts in betwixt Miss K
and me, either. “‘Either,’ they say, and ‘pray’
for ‘please’ still. Well, one did.” It’ll be dark
 
before we eat, but K’s stories of “seeing sights”
take me out again—by tube, by red double-decker
to where “Jello’s ‘jelly’ and, oh brother,
 
jelly’s ‘jam,’” so that I’m sheepish, I’m delighted,
both at once, once it dawns: I look (checker-
board shirt, khaki floods) like no one
                                           but my father.
 
 

“Plunky's Lament”
 
Been a long time since I rock-’n’-rolled,
since I kicked out the jams, motherfucker,
so as I pick along on this pink Stratocaster
and hold the note, hold it and keep it on hold,
 
what I’m waiting on is that good hoodoo
it takes to make an odd sound sound sharp—
Dot Ashby’s jazz harp, Don Cherry’s “juice harp,”
the squeegee squeak when Miles ran the voodoo
 
down—and what I’d give for McDuff’s mini-Moog
(black keys white, white black), a tight-miked high-hat,
and to be ax man enough to pick a peck
                                   
of notes hip as these wack noodlings (dirty fugue,
banjo funk?), even if I can’t say for sure what
I’m hearing’s Béla Fleck, not that other fella, Beck.
 
 

White
  
Was it halfway up Fifth Ave. I caught that whiff
of sinus-clearing manure from some Soho-
born hack’s blindered ride—never mind the spiffy
 
top hat, plastic champagne flutes, the courtly bow—
that made me see me: age six and unseen (so me thinks)
at Quinn’s farm, all attention locked on how
 
that white horse’s shit steams and stinks
as it sinks into that white snow?
 
 

To an Oboe
  
If we can agree “there’s a music for everybody,”
      as Eric Salzman says, then yours
is mine. Double reed, narrow bell, dark shine
 
      of grenadilla wood from the Mpinga tree,
I’d never confuse you with a clarinet.
      Your “penetrating, brilliant tone”—I might
 
say arch, a touch reedy, though not so high
      as a whine—seems at home with a violin, viola
and cello in this Quartet in F Major
 
      by Mozart, though in my Webster’s you elbow in
comfortably enough between obnubilate,
      “to be cloudy, becloud,” and obol, “the ancient
 
Greek coin or weight equal to 1/6 drachma,”
      even if in the illustrative sketch you appear
to be played by Steve Martin. Still I hear you
 
      best in the Peter and the Wolf I heard a dozen
years ago at St. Gerard’s, in which you’re the duck
      who waddles, quacks and too quickly
 
gets gulped down for lunch by the bandy-legged
      wolf skulking about in velvet breeches,
but not quite, not yet, not before
 
      you paddle past once more in the cool dark
waters that flow from B flat below
      middle C upwards for over 2 1/2 octaves.
 

 
Fairfield Porter: Potato Farms and Hayfields
 
      and the green and yellow spill
of trees were what I found here.
      The island was very, very
dry that summer and the grass
      turned the color of the rock.
This is how light works: Elaine
 
      de Kooning in orange and a muddy
brown jackety thing on
      the floral-print couch, a smattering
of flowers, just smudges, really—
      blips of white, yellow, pink
against the shore, then the lighter patch
 
      of light on my hair, the twin pin-points
of white in Katherine’s eyes, and here—
      the clean gleam of our
Adirondack chairs: white on white,
      sitting over their shadows
on the lawn, and on the table an open bottle,

      a glass. I placed a half-filled glass
in Southampton and the island rose
      around that glass: the studio, Anne
in the doorway come to see
      me, and out the window the pink
and purple Canterbury bells and foxglove.

      Jimmy planted those. Do you recognize
the morning harbor’s pink, cerulean,
      pale orange? It was always clear to me
this tree outside my studio was only
      eight strokes of white touched with gray,
so I painted it that way.