By strange coincidence, the word of the day at AWAD is “bon ton.” So if you’ve always wanted to know what it meant, there you go. It’s Bon Ton day! Let’s celebrate it my way: virtual unicorn tapestry cake and poetry.
Almost Blue
by Mark Doty
Chet Baker, 1929-1988
If Hart Crane played trumpet
he’d sound like you, your horn’s dark city
miraculous and broken over and over,
scale-shimmered, every harbor-flung hour
and salt-span of cabled longing,
every waterfront, the night-lovers’ rendezvous.
This is the entrance
to the city of you, sleep’s hellgate,
and two weeks before the casual relinquishment
of your hold — light needling
on the canal’s gleaming haze
and the buds blaring like horns –
two weeks before the end, Chet,
and you’re playing like anything,
singing stay little valentine
stay
and taking so long there are worlds sinking
between the notes, this exhalation
no longer a voice but a rush of air,
brutal, from the tunnels under the river,
the barges’ late whistles you only hear
when the traffic’s stilled
by snow, a city hushed and
distilled into one rush of breath,
yours, into the microphone
and the ear of that girl
in the leopard-print scarf,
one long kiss begun on the highway
and carried on dangerously,
the Thunderbird veering
on the coast road: glamor
of a perfectly splayed fender,
dazzling lipstick, a little pearl of junk,
some stretch of road breathless
and traveled into … Whoever she is
she’s the other coast of you,
and just beyond the bridge into the city’s
long amalgam of ardor and indifference
is lit like a votive
then blown out. Too many rooms unrented
in this residential hotel,
and you don’t want to know
why they’re making that noise in the hall;
you’re going to wake up in any one of the
how many ten thousand
locations of trouble and longing
going out of business forever everything must go
wake up and start wanting.
It’s so much better when you don’t want:
nothing falls then, nothing lost
but sleep and who wanted that
in the pearl this suspended world is,
in the warm suspension and glaze
of this song everything stays up
almost forever in the long
glide sung into the vein,
one note held almost impossibly
almost blue and the lyric takes so long
to open, a little blood
blooming: there’s no love song finer
but how strange the change
from major to minor
every time
we say goodbye
and you leaning into that warm
haze from the window, Amsterdam,
late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds
breathing in the lindens
and you let go and why not
——————————————-
Chet Baker — My Funny Valentine
Annie Lennox — Every Time We Say Goodbye (Cole Porter)
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