It is time to elegize a living man who died in my arms on the pages of the book I am now holding. I am writing to witness as he wilts into maple and fumbled ink thick like the garment he wears inside the fire of alphabet and leather. The pressure of effigy smoldering, singing in the last key before leaving. Nervous at yet another patricide, I held back and gripped infatuation. I’m her, lover turned killer turned daughter turned revival meeting abolitionist at the slaughterhouse, riveted by changes in the blood as love comes and goes. How dramatic it is, falling out of love with bad ideas of decent men. It’s always bothered me, how Lorca laments the death of the bullfighter and not the agony of the bull, a peaceful animal who only lowers her horns when approached by some sad bull mimic who trains all his life to fight his only ally; turning his admiration for her into a war with himself. But the bullfighter was Lorca’s friend, and the bull he meant to sacrifice was me. I had to take him. Had to bleed him in the ring. Had to be my own entourage and its own upending.
We had been caught in a loop, a power grid of slow mutiny and rotting lapis. The gem’s flecks of gold were his rotting fat trapped in me, heartfelt, amputated so well we screamed. That phat blue deed casts its shadow on this page—petals praying to the crosswind for mercy and finding only more versions of the bull grazing in pasture, her horns becoming mirrors and Miles’s forlorn trumpet footprints—on my skirt, in my eyes, in my merciless riding of that same wind. On our first weekend together, O was reading Downbeat’s The Miles Davis Reader. I was reading a collection of Derek Walcott poems called The Bounty. He’d play rare jazz LPs first thing in the morning while we cuddled in bed. When we got out of bed, he watched episodes of The Rickey Smiley Show that he’d taped himself while he ironed his clothes and I snacked on last night’s fruit. I wish I had a painting of this, of a woman watching a man she admired purely based on his music and his reputation for prolific artistic output, do domestic work in the morning. His tidiness was disarming, like he’d been a prisoner, a soldier, or a servant: it was regime where other parts of him seemed frayed and improvisational. We were at the Hudson Hotel in midtown Manhattan, blocks away from where I had worked my first summer in New York at the Alvin Ailey headquarters. I was a graduate student at Columbia studying poetry, intent on being a writer and many things alongside it, and he was a professional musician, with a goofy but endearing moniker. Both of our fathers were Northern soul singers, annexed to a segment of Black musicianship given its name by avid collectors in the UK.
I’d gone to lower Manhattan’s Winter Music Festival on a whim with some friends a couple nights before. I was just out of a six-year relationship. I ran into O in the audience at his own show. We were both leaning on a photo booth in the bowel of the tiny basement club. I smiled and he grinned. My hand automatically reached for his large obsidian and silver cuff and while I ran my fingers across its rough terrain absentmindedly, he muttered, You look nice. He had a practiced but very real shyness about him that masked bold arrogance. By the end of the night, after he performed, he asked me to take his number down and I handed him a book I’d been reading so he could he write it inside the jacket. The book was called Not Even Then, a collection of poems by Brian Blanchfield that I’d found used at the Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo. It was 2008. I had a maroon Nokia flip phone and refused to send text messages. I believed they would ruin the beauty of language, the beauty of exchanging language, the potential for true adoration that can be found in language first. The next night, I called him and he texted back, who goes there? I sent my first ever text message to tell him it was me and wish him a happy birthday. We met that night and his then label owner chaperoned us on our first date, playing pool and drinking.
He would go back to L.A. two nights later, and then to Japan. I asked for his address on our last morning together, feeling gallant, deep into those two or three days at the beginning of love when everything is doubly erotic and possible. I thought I’d write him letters, I’d find a way to build more intimacy between us across distances. I’d trust he was therare exception in his industry who wasn’t a slut on the road, or I’d put it out of mind since he behaved like a man seeking love or something like it. I’d take on a muse who was myself in another form, a real soulmate in that we were already operating from an inevitable oneness that close proximity almost seemed to breach, we were the secret lodged in one another as a part of ourselves we couldn’t access without this mirror. I believed this then, before he was real to me. I tore a poem out of the Walcott book and put it in his Miles reader while he showered. We kissed goodbye for hours. I went home and he went off to ship the records he’d bought to himself and fly home.
Armored in the bright-toned giddiness that comes with arriving in the bullseye of your destiny, I developed a skipping exuberance, and a colonial need to let O in on the world of esoteric poetry and theory which, based on his music, I decided was as shared a proclivity as our fathers’ blues. Since he released music under many names, most of them fictional reprises and remixes of the names of musicians he admires, thought of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa first. I sent him my copy of The Book of Disquiet alongside a meandering longform letter about Pessoa’s heteronyms, his practice of inventing not just names but entire biographies for each of his writing styles, his sweet disarming hysteria and how it proliferated his gifts as well as his delusions.
His reply was something along the lines of “Thank you, wow, you’re pretty deep.” And he suggested I read Mingus’s autobiography. That book begins with the unforgettable lines, “’In other words I am three.’” And thus began our union in separation and proliferation, our refusal to be one that demanded our oneness.
All the men I’d met in academia talked incessantly about their ideas, sharpening their brilliance on the fumes of desperation. I liked the laconic, verging on rude, exilic tendency in O and the way his recoiled and hyper-private spirit seemed to trust mine inherently. I hadn’t considered that any of it could be deceit or artifice yet, and so I got to adore what I thought was pure humility. I shared more books, my own earmarked copies.
John Cage’s Silence, Amiri Baraka’s “The Screamers,” Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Meditations in an Emergency, more Amiri, A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business, several poetry anthologies. I was anthologizing the stages of falling in love, somewhere in the background his favorite singer Donny Hathaway reminded we were alone and I was singing a song for you. And while I was building our affair’s endless syllabus in a stupor of uncanny fulfillment with what felt like unconditional affection, I was reading every biography of every jazz and soul musician O recommended and many he hadn’t read, to get ahead. An over achiever and her muse. Or a secretive musician and his poet muse. I was determined to gift us our own imaginary landscape, our own syntax that would let alone into it. We had that rhythmically; I wanted it in literature too. By the time I realized I was feeding a jester the king’s meals, it was too late to completely dampen my infatuation or his.
Two years passed like this. I became a published poet, I learned what he’d been hiding and forgave it naively, tentatively, with vengeance and virtue signal competing for my silence.
We read the Kaddish, we read A Power Stronger than Itself by George E. Lewis, more Baraka, Fred Moten, John Edgar Wideman, Sam Cooke’s biography, Monk’s. I cried myself to sleep some nights and woke up ecstatic and groping for the book on the nightstand and the phone, another text message saying thank you, or please, or baby come see me, I thought you’d be here by now. His grandest apologetic gesture back then was suggesting we make a ten-part jazz poetry album together. I stiffened—do you really think we’re ready for that? He made a version of it himself and we read more avidly from its samples. I had forgotten or not yet learned that being a muse is like being stolen, snatched, and that it moves both ways. I would have to learn the erotics of devastation and surpass them to become the patient woman who waits for her true love for so long he becomes dangerously intertwined with the sultry sulking feeling of waiting for pleasure and then becomes the dread of that pleasure that is always anticipating its resurgence. I began to dread everything I loved—with an acute dread that was actually more like possession, like refusing to admit you possess and are possessed by that which you pretend you are seeking.
In 2009, after hearing O’s uncle, a trumpeter, at the Blue Note, I met Amiri Baraka—he was the other poet alone in the audience at the late show, who also knew the band. I told him I loved his writing and presence and had been collecting his books and records. We were fast friends and went to a nearby bar for whiskey and reminiscing. A few more meetings for shows and drinks and he became a guide, friend, father figure, hero to me, and he read the dread and heartbreak on me before I could divulge it. “Don’t ever let anyone break you,” Amiri warned, sternly and seemingly out of nowhere one night, while getting out of a taxi we’d shared uptown. He was glaring at me like a sage on the brink of striking me with smoke and cymbals. This was a warning, brisk and severe. I spent the next ten years pretending to be lighthearted in his honor, until one day I really was.
On my desk beside me is a book called The Sound of Surprise, by Whitney Balliett. It’s about jazz music, and meanders between topics. I take a picture of the first page of a chapter called “Mingus Breaks Through” on which the author accuses Mingus of an exhilarating freakishness. I send the caption to O out of habit, having made ourselves of these habits and sacred scams of romance and scandal. He responds, “freakishness [smiley face emoji with the tongue sticking out].”
