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Candace McDaniel/via Freerange/adapted by JJM
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Imperceptible
You go to my head
You go to my head
– from the song You Go to My Head (1938),
written by J. Fred Coots & Haven Gillespie
It’s the little things that keep me awake at night. No, not bubbles in a glass of champagne. I mean those microscopic creatures you see on posters hanging on immunologists’ walls. They pester us all once the lights go out, feeding on skin cells, bits of hair, eternal worries. Their hideous form, magnified a few thousand times, would startle even Gregor Samsa in his bed – that Kafka dude who probably wished he’d turned into a double bass rather than a beetle (and nursed the beat for Oscar Peterson and Louis Armstrong in their ethereal You Go to My Head). For my part, I’m not fooled by their filthy, covert action. So what I do, is I get up, go to my guitar, fiddle with the ivory tuners, then trill a bunch of thirty-second notes from Recuerdos de la Alhambra. You want small, I’ll give you small. When the fingers tire, or stiffen, I doodle foolishly for a few bars on You Go to My Head. The key change seems natural enough – at least in my head. Fact is, long before this all started, I stood outside the operating room, a clueless bystander, as they placed her in my hands. She felt like a soft puffed-up wafer – a blessed wafer, for crying out loud. That’s right. Talk about small. I marveled at the wrinkles in her tiny eyelids. Then Time, with its sneaky slender fingers, performed that crazy sleight of hand, and out of the blue, one day, coming home from school, there she was, reminding me of Zeno’s paradox: Look look, she stammered with excitement, you keep halving the distance between the hare and the tortoise, but still he’ll never catch up! She sketched the scene on paper and showed me how motion was just an illusion. Motion and time. Going nowhere and everywhere. The hare and the now. Of course. I knew that. And yet I didn’t know that. How was this possible? How is any of this possible? I look at how she runs. Her small choppy steps. Then a burst of speed and her long-limbed loping legato strides. Django Reinhardt modulations: from Daphné to Nuages. I look at her unruly black hair and call her my fleet-footed Gipsy girl. I look at the rain and the leaves that always come back in the spring. I hear the thing her mother would do whenever her clarinet lilted through that solo of hers, the change from B-flat to E-flat major going straight to my head, and I see my hands stilled on the guitar as though trapped in amber, fossilized, except of course she’d glance over to cue me and then the glint in her eyes, and that sun-blessed smile, like a summer with a thousand Julys, would break the spell, after which the music, as ephemeral as our crazy romance, would flow into the next moment, and life would go on, measure by measure, until I was certain – yeah, pretty much dead certain – that this heart of mine hadn’t a ghost of a chance.
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Listen to Francis Fernandes read his poem
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Saxophone Lessons
Beethoven, introducing his student, Ferdinand Ries, to Haydn: “Sir, my student—Ries. He’s an idiot.” Haydn: “All students are idiots. It’s traditional.”
– from the film Eroica (2003), directed by Simon Cellan Jones, screenplay by Nick Dear
The sun comes up, spilling a crisp
Ben Webster solo on the drawn shutters
outside your bedroom window.
Your eyes open, blink, note the blazing
contour of the window frame – like
a sign from beyond, your very own
personal burning bush. But the body’s
lethargy drags you back down
into a fitful dream-laden sleep.
Mid-March. Worm Moon just past.
At last the world waking up: all
a-dazzle, unfurling tender buds,
invisible tree dust, the heady smell
of loam. The nights are still cold –
like in the Dark Ages when monks’
monophonic chants echoed in austere
stone abbeys. When the susurrus
and drone of Dorian and Lydian burnished
their faith. Does this truth somehow resonate
in your polyphonic soul? Because now
vibrant jazzy daylight harkens spring:
Get up! goes the injunction. The summons.
Or something like that. Forget the cortisone
and antihistamines. Forget anti-anything,
you hopeless, blessed contrarian. Haul
yourself out of that long, sound-negating
slumber. Haul the lost child from turbid
waters. Tap-dance around his head. Croon,
yodel, whistle. Swing, groove, pirouette
into an incarnation of the new morning
man. Yes, go ahead, save the day: breathe
sparkling sanctified life into those gleaming
brassy lungs – and, by god,
listen – listen for the music!
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Listen to Francis Fernandes read his poem
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Prayer
Well, it’s Christmas Day,
and the guitar is crooning truthfully
all it knows about joy and sorrow.
All I know are words. Not many, mind you.
Enough to talk my way in and out of a jam
(just ask the band), or sometimes even
as a bystander with open ears and reluctant heart.
Once, at a show, a snowstorm blew out the power,
and for thirty minutes we played in candlelight,
unplugged, unbidden. There was a new
intimacy, a different kind of hush: a layer
had been lifted from the sound, and so we were all –
listeners and players alike – that much closer
to the music.
At home, I have this climber
that started growing in a small pot.
Then the stems, like puppies,
couldn’t stop yapping and pushing out
against the daylight. They pushed in all directions,
stretching and winding around whatever
they could find. I added a couple more plants,
some rocks, some wooden animal figurines,
and now I have my very own jungle
of intricate concerns in front of the window –
a kind of Amazonian think-tank.
The only thing missing are chirping birds.
So when the guitar sings and the vines expand,
I try and give those lives the space they need.
Now take my daughter,
who lives three hours down the train line.
The thing there, well, I gave her
so much freedom that she turned the tables
on me and one day stopped calling me papa –
as though it were a term of shame – and started
shouting revolutionary mantras instead,
mostly online but also in the streets.
Now that’s okay. Because when you give someone
the gift of freedom it’s up to them to decide
what to do with it. Maybe I just didn’t think
this gift-giving thing through. Then that’s on me.
Sometimes I can be dense.
Still, today it’s Christmas and all.
And so, look, this is what I do: I wait
for the snow to fall. Fall like a gift –
of common sense and goodwill. Fall
like Billie Holiday singing the snow is snowing,
the wind is blowing. Or like a prayer.
I wait for it to fall and blow and bowl over
hard-headed phonies like me until they have
no choice but to really listen – listen and,
well, miraculously break out of that goddamned
grooveless act of theirs.
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Listen to Francis Fernandes read his poem
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Francis Fernandes grew up in Montreal. Following his studies, he relocated to Frankfurt, Germany, where themes of exile, identity, and cultural hybridity became central to his writing. His poetry and prose have been published widely, appearing in journals such as Third Wednesday, Saint Katherine Review, Syncopation Literary Journal, Jerry Jazz Musician, The Mackinaw Journal, The Brussels Review. His work – and in particular his manuscript, for which he is seeking a publisher – explores the intersections of music, sport, memory, and displacement, often weaving jazz improvisation and classical forms into narratives of resilience and belonging.
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