“Portrait of Sheila Jordan” – a poem by George Kalamaras

August 13th, 2025

photo of Shelia Jordan (1985) by Brian McMillen

Portrait of Sheila Jordan

The lady with the million dollar ears.
—Charlie Parker

Green tea tonight
And the smooth of your voice
Sheila
Bird was right
You could catch the perfect pitch
For me
It will always be Portrait of Sheila
“Falling in Love with Love”
“If You Could See Me Now”
Even Bobby Timmons’
“Dat Dere”
And I am right there
With you again tonight
As you coax starlight from the mouths of the dead
And make ornaments in the trees
With each note you bring from bees’ blood and moon glow
Somehow
Somewhere
You became a bird
A bluebird
A blurbird
Burrowing into me
The right and wrong
Of my own mouth
How could Bird resist your visits to his gigs
In Detroit
Where you sang the wing-beat of his name?
Eggs in the frying pan absorb all the butter that bathes them
Sun on the back porch becomes the sleeping cat and perfect pitch
Of its purr
You learned to fly by perching yourself
First in Detroit, then at the Page Three Club in the Village
I can’t get past the first page’s
First few sentences of each song you worm-feed me
Before I fall from the numerous notes of your nest
There are metaphors that stick
And some that mix
But when you sing all the blurring
Becomes this longing in my chest
For me
To walk down the aisle
Tongue in tongue
With what you tear open
Inside me
O Sheila
O Sheila Jordan
I am absorbed in your “Hum Drum Blues”
In your “Willow Weep for Me”
In your “Laugh, Clown, Laugh”
Even the Baltimore Oriole
You cannot flit
Oak to oak
Quicker than you
Can bring me to tears
Tonight
In Fort Wayne, Indiana
Just 162 miles southwest of Detroit
I can hear the years
Slow by and praise the gods
That 1963 is still coming true
Through the humming filaments of my tube amp
Where I stand alone in the cold
In the snow of your bones
Your nearly hollow bird bones
And beg you to feed me
And keep me awhile longer
In the twigs and tufts and drift
Of a home I hope not to ever be nudged from
Though when I hear you
I want to fly to wherever you tell me
I need to go

….Originally published in the Jerry Jazz Musician anthology, Kinds of Cool: An Interactive Collection of Jazz Poetry

Sheila Jordan died on August 11, 2025

Click here to read her New York Times obiturary

___

photo by Jim Whitcraft

George Kalamaras is former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014– 2016) and Professor Emeritus at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He has published twenty-seven collections of poetry, eighteen full-length books and nine chapbooks. He recently won the 2024 Indiana Book Award for his book To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, a 300-page chronicle of George’s Greek ancestry—literary, artistic, and familial (Dos Madres Press, 2023).

Watch a 1971 film of Sheila Jordan performing songs including “God Bless the Child,” “Dat Dere,” and “Inchworm” – with Arild Anderson (bass); Jon Christensen (drums); and Bob Stenson (piano).