Anthony Walton was born in 1960 in Aurora, Illinois, and received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and his M.F.A. from Brown University. Like his chief influences, he is a poet deeply rooted in the blues—using it almost as an etymology unto itself and an enabling pattern of life.
His work has appeared in The New York Times and The Oxford American, among other publications. He is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey (1996) and numerous articles and essays, and in 1998 he received a Whiting Writers’ Award. Walton is a longtime resident of Brunswick, Maine, where he teaches at Bowdoin College.
In Memoriam Thelonious Monk
You have to be able to hear past the pain, the obvious
minor-thirds and major-sevenths, the merely beautiful
ninths; you have to grow deaf to what you imagine
are the sounds of loneliness; you have to learn indifference
to static, and welcome noise like rain, acclimate
to another kind of silence; you have to be able to sleep
in the city, taxis and trucks careening through your dreams
and back again, hearing the whines and sirens and shrieks
as music; you must be a mathematician, a magician
of algebra, overtone and acoustics, mapping the splintered
intervals of time, tempo, harmony, stalking or sluicing blues
scales; you have to be unafraid of redundance, and aware
that dissonance-driven explorations of dissonance
may circle back to the crowded room of resolution;
you have to disagree with everything except the piano, black
and white keys marking the path you must climb step
by half-step with no compass but the blues, no company
but your distrust of the journey, of all that you hear, of arrival.
I have always been the poor
student, failing
geometry and physics,
confusing quadratics
with differentials.
You could explain it, master
of calculus, the night sky
the screen of your overhead
projector as you distinguished
terrestrial from extra-
terrestrial, then sailed
ferocious Orion, south
by southwest,
a forty-five degree angle
off your back step.
Sir Isaac Newton implied, you said,
that it all came down to gravity
and motion; bodies
moving. In Newtonian mechanics the stars
are in their courses, grooved
and suspended in space, gravity
pulling bodies toward other bodies
as they themselves are pulled
toward something else.
This is known as balance, equilibrium,
grace. Space is everywhere,
endless and empty,
it both is and contains what we know
of the universe,
and we may safely deduce
that our world is as it should be
as this is how it is.
It is all so simple:
the stars are in their courses, moving
through their fates,
moved by the immutable laws
of gravity and motion that rule
the world,
and it is my fate to be here,
a moving body in motion,
in place, suspended,
balanced, and helpless.
More than likely she was Irish
or Italian, a sweet child who knew him
only as a shy clown.
Colleen, Jenny or Marie, she
probably didn’t even know
he had her picture,
that he had traded her cousin
for baseball cards or a pocketknife,
that her routine visage
sat smoldering in his wallet
beyond any price.
He carried his love
like a burden, and devotion
always has to tell.
Hell, he was just flirting
with that lady in the store,
he already had his white
woman back up in Chicago.
He wasn’t greedy, just showing
off, showing the rustics
how it was done. He had an eye,
all right, and he was free
with it, he knew they loved it.
Hey baby, was all he said,
and he meant it as a compliment,
when he said it in Chicago
the white girls laughed.
So when they came to get
him, he thought it was
a joke, he proclaimed himself guilty
of love, he showed them
the picture and paid the price of
not innocence, but affection, affection
for a little black-haired, blue-eyed
girl who must by now be an older
woman in Chicago, a woman
who will never know
she was to die for, that he died
refusing to take back her name,
his right to claim he loved her.
The fever broke in October,
and I woke sweating in a compost
of leaves,
the ashes of summer.
Asleep since spring,
the scythe of winter
through my dreams.
What is summer but a dream,
implying more
than it can mean?
Give me grey variations
of gray,
shadows fanning through water, clouds,
space,
I will trade hay for straw, daylight
for darkness.
Let me warm my hands on the blazing
trees,
breathe the dark wind chasing long days
into silence,
pass the long night in blankets
of snow.