Elegy For Thelonious Damn The Snow example essay topic

Elegy for Thelonious Damn the snow. Its senseless beauty pours a hard light through the hemlock. Thelonious is dead. Winter drifts in the hourglass; notes pour from the brain cup. damn the alley cat wailing a muted dirge off Lenox Ave. Thelonious is dead.

Tonight's a lazy rhapsody of shadows swaying to blue vertigo & metaphysical funk. Black trees in the wind. Crepuscule with Nellie plays inside the bowed head. "Dig the Man Ray of piano!" O Satisfaction, hot fingers blur on those white rib keys.

Coming on the Hudson. Monk's Dream. The ghost of bebop from 52nd Street, footprints in the snow. Damn February. Let's go to Minton's & play "modern malice" till daybreak. Lord, there's Thelonious wearing that old funky hat pulled down over his eyes. from Copacetic.

Copyright 1984 by Yusef Komunyakaa Online Source A Break from the Bush The South China Sea drives in another herd. The volleyball's a punching bag: Clem's already lost a tooth & Johnny's left eye is swollen shut. Frozen airlifted steaks burn on a wire grill, & miles away machine guns can be heard. Pretending we " re somewhere else, we play harder.

Lee Otis, the point man, high on Buddha grass, buries himself up to his neck in sand. "Can you see me now In this spot they gonna build a Hilton. Invest in Paradise. Bang, bozos! You " re dead". Frenchie's cassette player unravels Hendrix's "Purple Haze".

Snake, 17, from Daytona, sits at the water's edge, the ash on his cigarette pointing to the ground like a crooke finger. CJ, who in three days will trip a fragmentation mine, runs after the ball into the whitecaps, laughing Copyright 1993 by Yusef Komunyakaa Online Source Facing It My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone.

I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way-the stone lets me go. I turn that way-I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference.

I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare.

The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Copyright 1993 by Yusef Komunyakaa Online Source.