THE PLACE THE MUSICIAN BECAME A BEAR

for Jim Pepper

I think of the lush stillness of the end of a world, sung into place by

singers and the rattle of turtles in the dark morning.

When embers from the sacred middle are climbing out the other side of stars.

When the moon has stomp-danced with us from one horizon to the next,

such a soft awakening.

Our souls imitate lights in the Milky Way. We’ve always known where to go to

become ourselves again in the human comedy.

It’s the how that baffles. A saxophone can complicate things.

You knew this, as do all musicians when the walk becomes a

necessary dance to fuel the fool heart,

Or the single complicated human becomes a wave of humanness and forgets

to be ashamed of making the wrong step.

I’m talking about an early morning in Brooklyn, the streets the color of ashes,

do you see the connection?

It’s not as if the stars forsake us, we forget about them, or remake the pattern

in a field of white crystal or of some other tricky fate.

We never mistook ourselves for anything but human.

The wings of the Milky Way lead back to the singers.

And there’s the saxophone again.

It’s about rearranging the song to include the subway hiss

under your feet in Brooklyn.

And the laugh of a bear who thought he was a human.

As he plays that tune again, the one about the wobble of the earth

spinning so damned hard

it hurts.