Leaning Into The Afternoons

I hear the tenor saxaphone. It is playing the life span of a swift piece of driftwood in a stream gliding past slippery rocks worn smooth by melting mountain snows. This icy music is purifying the blood in my veins which courses softly with the brushed snare of her heart’s smoky possibilities.

I hear the warmth of the upright piano descending chromatically like the sigh of a bare leg dangling off the side of a tousled bed.

I hear the vibraphone and it is syrupy sweet and dizzy with spilled perfume. I hear mallets pummeling the soft skin along a woman’s spine. She’s lying on her stomach now, tilting a glass of white wine occasionally into her absent-minded lips, her legs bent upward at the knees, swaying like slender wild flowers in a breeze, her feet playing with each other. Fondling. Minds of their own.

The muted trumpet tosses us a melody thorny into the subconscious like a long-stemmed Margo rose – pricking distant memories which could be painful if pressed for detail, leaving bloody fingerprints. We pull off the petals a few at a time and toss them into the warm bathwater of the upright bass solo that bows foamy over our feet.

Now the saxophone is back, angry and bored with the boundaries of this world.

It is all over the place, a needling child trying to get her hands in the pockets of a candy god. It is the sound of someone wrestling out of a straightjacket, while running along the edge of ocean cliffs. A bird beating her wings against the roof of her cage, determined to fly or die – and fuck all else!

Ah, now this is more like it, she whispers, sitting back and crossing her legs. She’s fully clothed, but she just doesn’t care anymore about behaving the way a lady supposedly should. She’s freer than that. More spontaneous and child-like. Her head rolls back and her eyes close. She’s beyond me now, her spirit set loose to heights and vast reaches of which I can’t imagine. All behind those shuttered, oceanic eyes.

When she walks out into the night in the wee hours of the morning, there is a new air about her. She’s pulling on my arm as if every dark alley is calling her name. Though she is wild and boundless now, we somehow still orbit each other – my hi-hat marking the metre that assures she will not fall.

Roots and wings, love. Always roots and wings.