“MILESTONES – Poems…With Words…Without Words” by Tony Brinkley

October 15th, 2025

…..MILESTONES is a hybrid piece in which poems and icons (poems without words) interact. The point of departure is Miles Davis’s modal jazz from the 1950s.

…..The icons are not illustrations for the poems and the poems are not commentaries for the icons. They co-exist – the way memories and their verbalizations co-exist with the things you see on a city street or on a walk in the woods. John Cage and Merce Cunningham practiced this aesthetic of co-existence when Cage played music while Cunningham danced (but without dancing to the music).

…..An icon is a likeness of the spiritual energy for which it a leading wave. A poem – its words and phrases – are expressions of spiritual energies for which it is also a leading wave. Taken together, gazing complements reading, reading complements gazing. The interplay is unpredictable, and once they are internalized, the likeness dissolves, the expression quiets, but the energies remain palpable as they inform inner life and as they change your mind. As Cage would say, as the mind changes, self-expression becomes self-alteration. At least I hope so.

-Tony Brinkley

___

MILESTONES

Poems . . . With Words . . . Without Words

.
Don’t be afraid of mistakes. There are no mistakes. . . . Don’t play
what is there, play what isn’t. . . . It’s not the note you play that’s
the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it
right or wrong. . . . Sometimes it takes a long time to sound like
yourself. . . . If you don’t know what to play, play nothing.

—Miles Davis

1. Death Sentences

Je suis á l’article do la mort.
—Quebecois Saying

Listen – my piano – finger in the
cruelties – rest-notes with my next
breath – pleased with all my life.

A little crazy maybe – but though
possibly a little – my second person –
miming – plays solo while ascending –

my mind stumbles – on my tongue
its stutter gives more time for me to
improvise along the lines I balance –

the borders between the and an
where here – à l’article de la mort –
death sentences are very close to love.

2. When Nothing Is There

When nothing is there, play something that isn’t – or
something as if it were nothing – were not – though
necessarily it is – or at least is a residue of its own
disappearance – a fading resonance proximate to
silence – quieting that quiets – then quieter though
never quietest – unfinished silencing – approaching
the proximities of impossible but never there (like
counting eternally toward infinity but always un-
limited) though as if even that might also be possible –
though not now, not here, not this. Not yet? If there’s
nothing to play, play nothing – play beautifully – play
whatever you can when you can’t. You’re in love. And
…………….then pause.

3. When Yesterday Was Still Today

When yesterday was still today and tomorrow
was about to be, your thoughts as your thought
wandered through my mind – though pervasive –
as always to me inaccessible – left to wonder
as they poured through every pause and every
pore – murmuring through my skin – but always
as yours and not mine – as nothing I could think –
a total stranger to me – alive within me – almost
my unconscious – thinking things I could not
possibly think – your thoughts in mine – like
the kindness of blue – approximate to silence.
Listen with me – as if God were back in the room.
If silenced – when I quiet what I think, when I’m
only left with you – with yours – nothing of my-
self – alone with you – murmuring through the
pores and pauses – carried along, even swimming
in the stream – without resistance – at times your
thoughts in mine are music – a kind of blue. If
I think the things I can’t and play the thoughts
I hear – tomorrow not today – will I find myself
in your music – in your thoughts living in mine?

4. Leaving

While I sleep, thinking this without me –
that I’m missing the train I am lost on.

The train goes for miles – on a horseshoe
curve late night in the coal mountains.

Words – more or less – may be less then they
cost on route to the outcry they’ve silenced.

When I’m born here, nothing means any-
thing now, and anything, nothing else.

5. We Are Together

Train whistles – we are together – you
murmur in my sleep. While you think
what you think when I can’t, outbreath
breathes out like a harmonica. Is it that
cold or hot? I don’t play what there is but
what isn’t. Tomorrow perhaps I may sound
like myself so long as I play what I can’t.

6. My Night Piece

Go – rock carefully –
Terror is in progress . . .

—Osip Mandelstam

In the dark, helplessly
alert – but what are you

really – lurking in my
night-piece? The heart

avoids its tremors. It beats
after beating. Breathe me

out into the dark a hole
breathes out through.

.
7. Settling Down

If your love were like
a blue dragonfly – and
it is.

Without weighing
or thinking
I am this way
too

finding because
I am quiet
it hovers
finally.

___

Tony Brinkley’s poetry, art, and translations have appeared in many publications, including Mississippi Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Four Centuries, Hinchas De Poeste, and Poetry Salzburg Review. . Before retirement, Brinkley taught literature at the University of Maine. He is co-editor (with Keith Hanley) of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press).

Listen to the 1957 recording of Miles Davis performing the Jerome H. Remnick/Ray Henderson/Mort Dixon composition “Bye Bye Blackbird,” with Davis (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor saxophone); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); and Philly Joe Jones (drums). [Columbia/Legacy]