Four Flats, Getting Dark Soon, Nothing To Do But Walk

                                        --for Bob Zieff's "Sad Walk"

Walk it: the long hall of the horn,

passage of amber, trumpet of honey,

sweet, unbearably sad.  Walk it: the bridge over

troubled waters, deep complaint of the bass, wind

making the guy wires hum.  Walk it: piano,

bucket of jewels swinging

on the shoulder of a girl from a far

province, the percussion of stones

and the high stretch of her voice, singing,

as the stones play against the bright metal

of the bucket's rim.  Walk the path

that winds between notes, step

between dark hedges of sound, the green

notes depending on the aisles of silence,

the soul pushing its cart up the empty rows,

arms drawing the bow across strings,

the slide of the horn, back and forth,

the shuttle drawn in, pulling the string

through, drawing it out--as the leaves turn

restless and rustling on the branch, sheets

billow out on the line, the grasses bend--the night

is coming on, the blue air cooling fast:   

below, a man, drawing his collar

closed and his coat tighter around him, stopping

there, under a streetlight, for a moment,

gathering the light around him like a shawl,

he lifts his trumpet to the moth-swarm of the stars,

pauses, an interval like a held breath, then

he is walking it, walking out on it

across a bottomless canyon of air, nothing

but the song to sustain him, walking

those long notes home.