“Lee and Helen” — two poems on Lee Morgan, by Ed Coletti

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Herbert Behrens / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lee Morgan; November, 1959

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Lee and Helen

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1. All About Lee Morgan

bass
…………..piano
……………………….blues

low
…………..down
……………………….blues

and higher now
12 bar blues
right now
cliché
like
“a little bit a soda”
but not.

I know who you be
Lee
Lee Morgan
hard boppin
Cliff Brownin
muscle hornin
brass
…………..balls
……………………….ballin

Lee Morgan’s haulin
balls-a-brass
triple tonguing
funky man!
shot to death by
your common law wife,

way too common, man!

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2. Every Song’s Got More To it
(for Helen)

That’s what smacked me down
watching the documentary
I CALLED HIM MORGAN
It continued to gnaw at me
that in a poem I’d been so unfair
to Helen because she’d shot Lee Morgan
that transcendent trumpeter to death

Helen Morgan down South
who bore her first child at 13
her second at 14 and who gave
both of them up to be raised
by their grandparents before
she married a much older man
who drowned and she again was
alone but now independent and

On her way to New York City
where she earned her living as
a phone answering service worker
to keep an apartment on 53d St
where she cooked and made home
for herself and half the jazz musicians
in New York who knew her as their Mom
who knew how to cook and care for them

Not the least of these young Lee Morgan
she pulled from the gutter of heroin
took him to Bellevue started him on methadone
and a new life clean and brilliant as the best
horn player of his very young generation

Lots of love between them though Helen
quite naturally had an impossible time abiding
Morgan’s vibe for a woman who he called
his friend and who also knew him the way
Helen Morgan did Two women who understand
one man too well The first would never stand for
the latter and as with Frankie and Johnny
it had to end. And boy could that Helen ever cook!

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Ed Coletti is a poet, painter, fiction writer and middling chess player. Previously, he served briefly as an Army Officer, then as a Counselor and later as a Small Business Consultant. Recent poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Volt, Spillway, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Inflectionist Review, and So It Goes The Literary Journal of The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Museum. His book Apollo Blue’s Harp And The Gods Of Song was recently published by McCaa Books. Ed also curates the popular twelve-year-old blog “(ed coletti’s)No Money In Poetry” 

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Listen to the 1968 recording of Lee Morgan performing his composition “Helen’s Ritual,” with Bennie Maupin (tenor saxophone); Cedar Walton (piano); Reggie Workman (bass); and Billy Higgins (drums). [Universal Music Group]

 

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