Lynn. Jazzman. 1950.

         -for Bob Zieff

Coming or going it’s a sad walk

like finding your father

threadbare when you visit, like

walking out on a woman who holds

a kid of yours on each knee.   

Generation after generation

they keep the seawall up, but even   

the mansions that front it have

softened into the bloodless, gray

ranks of the tenements tiered out behind.

Long gone, the pulse of this place  

was Labor, organized & improvised

in Central Square, in Union and Market Street halls, 

immigrants alive on the lines together,

working or meeting or marching in spaces

made as music is made, opened and measured out

for so many humans -- genius, difference --  

to hold each other up a while to shine,

to lose in the othering nothing, but to gain   

a buoyant enough,  a heart

kaleidoscopic as a mind,

the kind of beauty power knows holds a fuse.

So the city makes you ask yourself  

How did I fail? and you play it

every which way from Sunday: the afterimage

of the song, colorlight shot through

with ruminative, back-turning riffs, down-falling

undoings. When living-wage factories

closed and workers went jobless, who

could leave? Who could stay? Who isn’t

alone in a welfare line? What new town

doesn’t start you at the bottom?

The answer to your question passed over

as a shadow that took its capital elsewhere.

Not for that hand to stick around

and play little hopes scuttled in the only

streets that might bear them. Organized

Forgetting  the poet, Milosz, called it. You,

heartsong, local-boy-makes-good, (oxymoron),

answer:  This is how it sounds.