ON A TASHKENT WINTER NIGHT
Midnight snow blows
across the street lamp
cool as the bodies
in the morgue
of the military hospital
just across the street
and I hear Concierto De Aranjuez
floating dimly through memory’s walls
and remember a rainy Clark Air Force Base
afternoon in the sixties, getting some rack time,
sweating in the humidity, stripped
to shorts, chilling to Miles one barracks bay over.
Outside the snow grows in volume;
Miles wavers in and out, a radio beacon
from the past, distorted by static
of the years between.
The snow tumbles, floats, falls into memory, blends
with the cool blue river of Miles, Miles, Miles.
Uzbekistan, 1998
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Michael L. Newell is a retired secondary school English/Theatre teacher who currently lives on the south-central Oregon coast. He has had poems recently published in (among other places) Verse-Virtual, Culture Counter, The Iconoclast, Ship of Fools, and Red Eft Review.
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A wonderful poem filled with memories and melancholy. So Miles painted too: art and heartbreaking music with pregnant pauses in between, probably with a nose of cocaine. Some people are blessed beyond belief with so much talent …