Jazz Highway
Driving
southeast on 136 takes me through Crawfordsville, Indiana,
an underground
railway town where runaway slaves had been protected.
I lift
my foot slightly off the accelerator, trying to gain time to
find your
young
years on the tenebrous highway, though I’m hyper-excited to
attend
a Cincinnati
jazz festival this weekend, hungry for hard bop and free jazz.
Yet,
the future doesn’t matter right now---no, it’s the obscure childhood
you
left
me with; you had no ponderous genealogy to spread across the
floor as
Dad,
so I know only the intangible and fragile outlines of your Midwest
past.
I wonder
whether you sat beneath the beech tree under which Lew Wallace
wrote
much of Ben Hur or knew about Ezra Pound’s very short
teaching stint
at Wabash
College, your neighborhood school, and how his bohemianism got
him
quickly fired, the man who wrote, “For I am weird untamed,”
something
in which
you could never aspire to as a mother who often spoke of soft
finches
and
your own mother pushing you on a swing roped over an oak tree
in the backyard.
As I
drive past silos, I sniff grainy breezes, the hot wheat cakes
at your breakfast table,
a fact
made real with my car window rolled down, windy onrushes sifting
my nostrils
for
customer-farmers’ effluvium, you standing at your father’s side
in his hardware store.
Crossing
railroad tracks: Were these the same irons taking you north
after your dad died?
If I
stopped, I wouldn’t be able to resist pressing my ear next to
the rails, trying to hear
that
locomotive, how its fated iron pulled you from your favorite,
weedy back streets
where
you’d meet friends, drinking celebrated, never archaic, stool-spinning
milkshakes.
But
there must’ve been other events of fierce, ginned tumescence
removed from your
parent’s
dominion, perhaps in that dark, brazen copse to my right as
I drive faster now,
never
losing your youth for in all the walls, houses, buildings, grass,
fields, alleys possess
an animism
always persisting: you’ve told me nothing once born will ever
be destroyed,
all
your footsteps, tears, dreams, curses, premonitions, exfoliations,
all you’ve touched,
loved
or beheld in this town have been absorbed into atoms of materiality
and breathes.
But
energy, not memory, will let me hear Sonny Rollins blow All
The Things You Are.
I peer
into the dark-chrome, rearview mirror, aware that this transit
through your birth-
place
and hometown gave to me your own impromptu passages, creating
my present
existence
yearning to hear the most soulful jazz possible.
George Sparling has been published in many literary magazines including Tears in the Fence, Lynx Eye, Hunger, Rattle, Red Rock Review, Rattle,
Paumanok Review, Lost and Found Times, and Potomac Review. He has had many jobs, such as a welfare caseworker in East Harlem, a counselor/reading instructor in
the Baltimore City Jail, and a scuba diver for placer gold in the Trinity Alps of Northern California for two years.
He tries through fiction and poetry to give all dark things the light they require to exist unconditionally.
The tension between persons living in pain and the struggle not to fail as human beings also concerns him.
George Sparling
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