Jon Tribble
(USA)
Montage for Langston
Jazz wasn’t born in Joplin or Lawrence, Lincoln or Cleveland—but it was
anywhere you listened to the weary blues of everyday hardships,
music of the common voice singing uncommon truths, waiting to
explode from Harlem streets, from an America of promises as
simple as they were pushed aside, ignored, broken, or deferred.
Music in the cadence of prayer rises to a stream of complaints ready to
explode from classrooms, lunch counters, stores and factories where the
river of indignities spills past all levees. No one expecting life to be a
crystal stair—but a fair chance owed, an opportunity for a dream that won’t
explode into shards of disappointment, nickel and dime frustration no
river can wash down its ancient banks, anger no nation can contain for long.
Learn by teaching, teach by learning, the page coming out of you;
anywhere you listened to the world you found the words,
news in your poems of tomorrow’s headlines, of today’s blues and future
glory and revelation that men and women of this world make into a
simple fact, an understanding that must still grow deep before us,
traveling from one generation to the next until your theme becomes
one voice speaking for many from many, a brassy trumpet of good
news that is overdue judgment and undeniable justice for all.
Human blood in human veins, we heal our sores together or fall
under the same blade slicing out the disease. There are no shortcuts to
glory, the distance from Harper’s Ferry to Lenox Avenue is measured in
human lives, in the families we lose when the revolution
explodes our history, changes the music around us from a long lament to a
simple pure note of celebration that sings out proud and true.
Closing The Heights
after Bambi (1942) and The Last Picture Show (1971)
First dark and last, if that last
were a town like Anarene, Texas,
and not an era ending one locked
door at a time, like Anarene, Texas.
We stood outside, an impatient line
beside the curling wall of glass bricks
that glowed cloudy-clear warm like
the final halogen bulb would flicker
in the projector’s shielded heart
on that September night I would
close these doors a last time nearly
twenty years later in 1985.
But this was the 1960s,
and a sister and brother and three-
year-old me kept shuffling in our
tight and always seemingly new
Buster Browns as we crept closer
to Thumper and shy Flower and
the bright-eyed Prince, a late March
afternoon I imagine but don’t
remember beyond the Technicolor
forest suddenly transformed,
a world of yellow orange red flame
and smoke’s shadow I woke to
frightened and confused and grumpy,
a littlest brother annoyed with
a sister’s tears for a death I couldn’t
then fathom, only a shot in the dark.
The Heights marquee one of the last
vestiges unchanged by those years
when I climbed up and out to pull
off all the heavy maroon letters
except the “C_L_O_S_E_D,”
the rest already auctioned and
sold along with the soon-to-be-
unbolted rows of theater chairs,
popcorn machine, and 1940s
art deco fixtures still unbroken,
whatever memories had market
value for the neighborhood
of living spirits haunted by
this shell of a movie palace
more prized as real estate than
cinema in a multiplex future.
My assistant manager helped me
hoist the red carpet rolled out
the night before to the flat roof
and with the champagne chilling
in the icemaker, I waited for Dawn
to join me to attend the sky’s
promised late summer meteor show
and watch the stars till morning.
I had viewed the final screening
through the projection room’s
tiny window, the over-dressed
Little Rock audience settling in for
the black-and-white Bogdanovich
classic but soon fidgeting in their
finery and expensive seats like
a sour child at a great-great aunt’s
funeral. I stretched my legs,
took a turn from the bow-tied ushers
to patrol the aisles, and I stopped
at the front to see the crowd
quiet and still as they looked up
at Cybill Shepherd’s Jacy Farrow
stripping awkwardly at the pool party,
stumbling on the diving board
and tossing her underwear
in the surfacing boy’s face before
slipping into the water, her
performance as petulant
and silly as a childish version
of selfish love. I was no Sam
the Lion, but that next night
the roof at least was mine,
and Dawn and I toasted the empty
darkened screen below us that
was soon to be pulled down
and packed off to El Dorado
or Malvern or Searcy, some town
small enough to hold on to
the bigger past a little longer.
Dawn’s old boyfriend
had resurfaced last weekend
on a Labor Day family lake trip
and she wasn’t sure anymore
of what her future meant or
the way it was unspooling
around her and as her hands
framed my face we froze
in a timeless movie still.
I wish I had seen some sign
like searchlights crossing
in the dark above but there were
only her brown eyes like
a startled deer’s script
for flight, and I knew then
like Sonny knew when he
returned to Ruth Popper
that some things are necessary
and unforgivable, that truth
and touch are not a promise,
just a wish. Never you mind.
Alone with the sound of my
footsteps, I checked the exits
one last time, stared back
at the empty house I had
seen many nights filled
with eight hundred fifty faces
shining in the reflected light
and shadows, an expectant
congregation awaiting each
new sermon of story and scene,
and for a moment I saw them
there again, saw myself back
in those early flames consuming
the world I woke to with each
furious wave of angry color
crashing around until escape
opened and my world was saved.
But it passed. The reels still rested
on the slick marble floor, awaiting
Film Transit to disappear with this
one hundred eighteen minutes
of loss, and only the creeping
gloom remained as I headed out
into the uncertain morning air.
“Chemistry of an Equation: Portrait of Adrian”
Elemental fire reaching out from the smith’s hands:
days and nights shaping and reshaping what her mind
now creates, fixes as part of the impermanent world—
art taking root, growing from the glass, from her heat.
Metal transformed from current malaise to possibility;
art taking root, growing from the glass, from her heat,
days and nights shaping and reshaping what her mind—
elemental fire—reaching out from the smith’s hands
re-invents as physical form for words, as the language of
art taking root, growing from the glass, from her heat.
Metal transformed from current malaise to possibility—
art taking root, growing from the glass, from her heat
to new meaning, spark and truth wed, revealed by
elemental fire reaching out from the smith’s hands,
justifying the testimony of copper, silver, and gold,
keeping a faith that the faithless do not see exists:
art, taking root, growing from the glass, from her heat.
____________________________________________
Short Bio
Jon Tribble is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Review and the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by Southern Illinois University Press. He is the recipient of a 2003 Artist Fellowship Award in Poetry from the Illinois Arts Council and his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology. His work was selected as the 2001 winner of the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence College. He teaches creative writing and literature, and directs undergraduate and graduate students in internships and independent study in editing and literary publishing for the Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/jon-tribble
http://www.storysouth.com/2013/09/interview-with-jon-tribble.html
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jontribble