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. gsparling@humboldt1.com

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