TIME & TIMES

I’m cleaning out old emails. I’m a hoarder in that way—like having voices in my ear. Even if I’m not aware they’re there, they are still doing their work. Much like the influence of people in my past or those now gone from the planet, they make a mark on me and I carry them forward. Grateful I’ve been made more.

Their words are with me even on a subconscious level, as if they’ve become a part me, a DNA drop. People often think we’re so individual, particular, separate, and yet we’re just one being particlized (I think I made that word up).

As I’ve been sorting through, I’m also aware that just eight years ago I would have been coming home from Melbourne and Beijing, Henry’s last tour. The miracle run when he was dying. But not yet. When we went, I was keenly aware that I, the inexperienced traveler, might have to figure out how to bring a body home. As it went, we returned and he passed weeks later. I love this photo I took of him then, still able to capture his joy, his essence.

Most of his music world didn’t know I existed, that I maintained the content on his website, that we were each the other’s love of this life/all life. For those who might be reading here and not know him, Henry was completely blind his entire life. He was an extraordinary human and a brilliant musician. Fiercely independent. We met by chance at the Maine Center for the Arts—me in the audience, him on the stage—and had a remarkable twelve-year run together.

In this video, he’s at Bar LunAtico in Brooklyn, his favorite spot, an intimate, local club where he often played whenever he didn’t have a gig somewhere else like San Francisco or Tokyo or London. He was pretty sick by this time, but watch those hands move! Henry played what Henry wanted to play at any given moment, as if these rhythms, the songs (an amazing voice) had risen up talking directly to him.

In recent years I’ve been writing a lot of poems that live in this Henry world—a sort-of aftertalk that rises up.

The drive to live in the present

a new combustion :: lens :: viewpoint filtered through a rough draft of a life.

Interludes or interstices of what I used to call time before you moved into another space of disembodied particulars.

An ether of soft flame, a smoke of time capsule.

You off to the incinerator. Me on the bus home to receive the box of you from the U.S. Postal Service, the deliverer of the dead. I held onto my mother for decades, my son for a year, and you only long enough for the arrival of the glitter of sunlight on the Penobscot after the day of the walkup gallery with the scissored paper boxes made of washi or tengu, maybe kozo or ogura, cascading from the ceiling :: voices a version of an echo around the corner :: laughter :: speckled phrases of beautiful, sometimes unusual, words. 

I drive off into the blinded rain and the impossible full-sky, top-to-bottom, ridge-to-ridge rainbow bridge of colors. 

Under my tongue, a sequin of rain pools now each night, harvesting what most people think must be the specter of heartbreak or heartloss, heartache, something heart-indefinable-but-painful in body speak. But body speak is no longer my chosen language: heart, not the organ or the metaphor, only the container… of all this presence.

On tomorrow’s today, rising before sunbreak, at the top of a random perfumed bluff, I pick silk threads and crimson flowers, fresh bread, lavender and cod, feel your lips on my right shoulder.

                                                                        —published Scavenger Journal

This poem is brand new. Obviously, since Sonny Rollins died on 5/25/26. Usually I don’t put new work right out since it really does take a while for words to find their real shape, to say what they intend. But here we go. I can hear the clock ticking.

The Band

This evening under a
murmuration of starlings
I collect the things you
would not miss if you
were here in bodytime
like AI and the drones
over Kiev. I want to
pack them away, one
less to corrupt. Yes,
yes, every-one is still
doing the best they
can [or they’d
be doing better!]. I get
it. I do. But I don’t
understand why we’re
going backwards, this
regression, since you
left. I wish you’d sound
a message, a code, tap,
help me lift and move/
lighten. I know, only so
much you can say. Only
so much I can hear.
Sonny Rollins joined
the band today. Getting
stronger. A careful re-
reading. The nature of.

Photos by AJ