The Widow's Jazz

The white flesh quakes to the negro soul
Chicago! Chicago!

An uninterpretable wail
stirs in a tangle of pale snakes

to the lethargic ecstasy of steps
backing into primeval goal

White man quit his actin' wise
colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes

Haunted by wind instruments
in groves of grace

the maiden saplings
slant to the oboes
and shampooed gigolos
prowl to the sobbing taboos.

An electric crown
crashes the furtive cargoes of the floor.

the pruned contours
dissolve
in the brazen shallows of dissonance
revolving mimes

of the encroaching Eros
in adolescence

The black brute-angels
in their human gloves
bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks

and impish musics
crumble the ecstatic loaf
before a swooning flock of doves.

Cravan
colossal absentee
the substitute dark
rolls to the incandescent memory

of love's survivor
on this rich suttee

seared by the flames of sound
the widowed urn

holds impotently
your murdered laughter

Husband
how secretly you cuckold me with death

while this cajoling jazz
blows with its tropic breath
among the echoes of the flesh
a synthesis
of racial caress

The seraph and the ass
in this unerring esperanto
of the earth
converse
of everlit delight

as my desire
receded
to the distance of the dead

searches
the opaque silence
of unpeopled space.