WEBVTT

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My mother was a
musician, and she

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taught me a lot about music.

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I don't know if any of you--

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of course, you
weren't born, but you

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may have heard of a jazz man
whose name was Billy Eckstine.

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Billy Eckstine was a
beautiful jazz man,

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had a marvelous voice.

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He was popular in the
40s, 50s, 60s all the way

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through the 80s, and my
mother wrote the song

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that jettisoned his career.

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It was jettisoned with
Earl Fatha Hines Orchestra.

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I don't know if you've heard of
Gregory Hines, who just died.

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Gregory Hines is a dancer.

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Earl Hines was his father.

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And my mother created this
song with two other people,

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and it's now on a Decca record,
and some museums are trying

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to get their hands on it.

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I won't let them touch it.

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It's going into the family.

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But she was a beautiful--
she loved music,

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and she liked to listen
to an opera called

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Cavalleria Rusticana.

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Now, I don't like
that opera myself,

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but she liked to listen
to the intermezzo,

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and I grew up listening to the
intermezzo from that opera.

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She also taught me a great
deal about what happens

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when you transpose in music.

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That's when its music is taken
from one octave to another,

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and if you ever listen to
Judy Garland or Frank Sinatra,

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you would hear them do that.

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They will take a song and take
it from one octave to another.

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So I did this poem
for her, and it's

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called "Intermezzo:
My Mother Listens

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to the Cavalleria Rusticana."

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In my mother were operas
and poems and sweet ballads,

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floating upon jazz tempos,
and she brought me out

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of her body with
the number seven

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wrapped around our
umbilical cord,

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a reminder of the
surgical severance that

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never cut clean
enough for the navel

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to reach the ends of
the earth she lived in,

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seeded and silenced.

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Such music embraced
her for being

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so perfect that the comings and
goings of pain and unquestioned

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entities of the spirit really
caused her to comfort those

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around her who needed
to be in her skin,

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and give me air to
search and breathe

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my own seeding beyond what I
knew or wanted, or didn't want

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or had forgotten.

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The days went and came like
scant November leaves dangling

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upon backyard
juniper trees, songs

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of sweet a cappellas
and burnt umber flowing

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to the wealth of arias settling
within her managed sight

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and strained pieces of memories.

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For she knew how to
sift the comfortable

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from the catastrophic, and she
knew the patient sound of solos

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put into her mourning breast.

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Days on end, she ran her fingers
over the keys of the piano

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as if in the murmurs
of music, there

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were some long
lost love hovering

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in a body of adagios
too sweet to undo.

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There were things to know, why
swans sing before they die,

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how crabs prevent
themselves from crawling out

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of a suffocating barrel,
where the last firefly went,

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what old Josiah
said before he died,

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why Grandma Lee
was an alcoholic.

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All the lessons
learned and forgotten

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in the spill of an autumn
moon or the scream of a star.

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It was for me to remember
the Cavalleria Rusticana

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as if that opera were the
language of women born

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of men, who conceived them
after the rib was broken

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and music took over the
world and the histories

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of smiles and soft ablutions.

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At her dying, she
taught me to transpose

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the deep dust of darkness
into unsuspecting light,

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and where to pull the key
from the original octave

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and take it higher,
somewhere else

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into the languishing intermezzo,
pulling joyfully at the heart

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and at the edge of
the sun's sleep.

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