My mother was a musician, and she
taught me a lot about music.
I don't know if any of you--
of course, you weren't born, but you
may have heard of a jazz man whose name was Billy Eckstine.
Billy Eckstine was a beautiful jazz man,
had a marvelous voice.
He was popular in the 40s, 50s, 60s all the way
through the 80s, and my mother wrote the song
that jettisoned his career.
It was jettisoned with Earl Fatha Hines Orchestra.
I don't know if you've heard of Gregory Hines, who just died.
Gregory Hines is a dancer.
Earl Hines was his father.
And my mother created this song with two other people,
and it's now on a Decca record, and some museums are trying
to get their hands on it.
I won't let them touch it.
It's going into the family.
But she was a beautiful-- she loved music,
and she liked to listen to an opera called
Cavalleria Rusticana.
Now, I don't like that opera myself,
but she liked to listen to the intermezzo,
and I grew up listening to the intermezzo from that opera.
She also taught me a great deal about what happens
when you transpose in music.
That's when its music is taken from one octave to another,
and if you ever listen to Judy Garland or Frank Sinatra,
you would hear them do that.
They will take a song and take it from one octave to another.
So I did this poem for her, and it's
called "Intermezzo: My Mother Listens
to the Cavalleria Rusticana."
In my mother were operas and poems and sweet ballads,
floating upon jazz tempos, and she brought me out
of her body with the number seven
wrapped around our umbilical cord,
a reminder of the surgical severance that
never cut clean enough for the navel
to reach the ends of the earth she lived in,
seeded and silenced.
Such music embraced her for being
so perfect that the comings and goings of pain and unquestioned
entities of the spirit really caused her to comfort those
around her who needed to be in her skin,
and give me air to search and breathe
my own seeding beyond what I knew or wanted, or didn't want
or had forgotten.
The days went and came like scant November leaves dangling
upon backyard juniper trees, songs
of sweet a cappellas and burnt umber flowing
to the wealth of arias settling within her managed sight
and strained pieces of memories.
For she knew how to sift the comfortable
from the catastrophic, and she knew the patient sound of solos
put into her mourning breast.
Days on end, she ran her fingers over the keys of the piano
as if in the murmurs of music, there
were some long lost love hovering
in a body of adagios too sweet to undo.
There were things to know, why swans sing before they die,
how crabs prevent themselves from crawling out
of a suffocating barrel, where the last firefly went,
what old Josiah said before he died,
why Grandma Lee was an alcoholic.
All the lessons learned and forgotten
in the spill of an autumn moon or the scream of a star.
It was for me to remember the Cavalleria Rusticana
as if that opera were the language of women born
of men, who conceived them after the rib was broken
and music took over the world and the histories
of smiles and soft ablutions.
At her dying, she taught me to transpose
the deep dust of darkness into unsuspecting light,
and where to pull the key from the original octave
and take it higher, somewhere else
into the languishing intermezzo, pulling joyfully at the heart
and at the edge of the sun's sleep.