II: Mozart and Lady Day

Caught in the freedom between time and time
doing simple variations on a chart
I listened for once to Lady Day
harvesting sun and shadows with her
soft threshing voice and laying
in my heart her permanent
abundance, which sadness now can never
touch. Many men will make money here
but that is her tribute, and this:
she makes dead sound seem live.

Does every man feel that he could hold her?
Here? Now? The delicious cycle of sleep
and waking that touches lightly and repeatedly
on our death breaks through every
quaver of her voice with light and
I want to explain her! Hang my eyes
out on the line to shrivel and dry
and pierce my ears if ever I shatter
the shell of magic that contains that voice.
Money has more reason here than knowing.

The great projectors of our race who turn
oils into sfumato or words into a bright shock
slip through the markets of our minds
unharmed. R.D. Laing who can roll a piano
with the best of them finds accounts
of his feeling in the music--here's where
he takes the turn away from artistry. Mozart
in his mother's uterus sings and the
song won't stop for more than 30 years.
And so what I am making here is worth as
much as money. Art is a discourse
that captures what busyness must miss,
a way of being no bottom line can reach.