C.D. Sonnet

Fingering with the tongue the place the tooth

used to be —my cat nips at my foot—doesn’t eat

her food and cannot tell me why you are

Gone into the dark where the boy strokes the

Orchid – does it have a faint perfume or not?

So many questions and immediacy

I realized by using the high notes

of the chords as a melodic line, and

by the right harmonic progression, I

could play what I heard inside me.

That’s when I was born Charlie Parker said

from the vernacular to the luminous

screen I raise it up for you tonight you

who took pleasure transcribing red to gold

What I imagine shape-singing to be

for C.D.

I was a little bit late to meet C.D. at the bar with Miranda in tow. C.D. had brought her a gift of Groovy Girl doll named Kyle – ragdoll with freckles, grin, short red yarn hair and NASCAR T-shirt, and I says “That’s so great that you bought her a boy doll.”

“No,” C.D. says, “She’s a girl.”

C.D.’s first reading at Brown. Red high-top converse lace-ups. In the Crystal Room. A Red Cover of Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues.

Then she brought Esmerelda and Olga Broumas.

Snaps me out of surface vapidity language play for language sake.

I “babysit” Brecht while C.D. gets her General Electric Award at the Algonquin. Then we all get to eat at Café Une Deaux Trois.

I take her to a Richard Hell reading at CBGBs and she is not overly impressed.

We try to meet at Shopsin’s one visit but we both get lost because it moved.

Seeing how skinny she was at the Y sauna. This wiry woman has such power.

Where are the Deborah Luster photos with infrared light we took in the dining room?

The Singing Knives – white covers, red line around a very spare surreal south.

Footsteps of Jesus on any beach. He doesn’t say much.

I inhabit the dense June bug humidity of a bell jar swamp vine found poem embellished in every day song life, still a long way to go.