T. R. HUMMER

For Dancers Only: Suite for Jimmie Lunceford, 1902-1947

Lunceford's band was one of the finest orchestras of the swing era, its well-drilled sound and the precision of its section playing being unrivalled by any other group. Lunceford's reluctance to pay for additional singers and dancers to tour with his band led to his musicians doing this themselves, and earning the nickname "the performing seals."  —BBC Radio 3, 100 Jazz Profiles

'Taint What You Do

When the muttering starts in the street, the word aubade
Is not in its vocabulary, though freight trains drum their cargo
Of copper wire and emptiness over the river bridge
Straight for the heart of the sun. Some of its timbre is friction,
Wind against brick, iron against asphalt, old rain
Making its way through pipe; some of it is chemical—
Carbon bonding with oxygen, wood and stone breaking down;
Some is irreducible, like dark matter, like the reason
This old man slumps on a rotting stoop, counting
The nickels in his hand and moaning. Morning
Refuses to hear him. Morning has its own game going
And stops at nothing, cruising crosstown to the Horizon Club
In a slick limo, almost silent, anxious to make the drop.

Blues in the Night

The horoscope says disaster is coming. The weatherman
Says rain. Garbage trucks go about their dirty business
Not caring either way. What message did you want
To leave? Who did you say was calling?
There are traditions for such things. One of them says
There is no tradition; it's been saying so forever.
Another says the form repeats itself; just stick around.
Music needs no subject, but one always turns up
Unexpectedly, dragging its trashy story,
A human figure, a woman, her dress black under streetlights.
Look at her: she just got off a bus from nowhere,
Her face shining with sweat. Or has the storm rolled in?

Uptown Blues

All style, all surface—no tears in the harp, no tears in the harpist.
Nothing comes up. Under the Salvation Army awning
They pass an empty hat from hand to hand
Until somebody steals it; slick as a plunger-mute lick,
It disappears. A scum of powdered eggs for breakfast,
Boiled coffee, something that used to be a wedge of bread.
No sermon, no praise, no blame. Everything is forgiven.
The airshafts to the depths are locked. A sterno drinker
Swallowed the key at midnight, and in the smoggy breaking
Of another backstreet morning, he is sifting his own shit.

Well, All Right Then

Another morning of broken storefronts, another evening of fists.
By midnight the street is littered with ticket stubs and empties—
Enumerations of emanations, .22 casings, tire carcasses, and fog.
Music at a distance. Lazy jump blues, horns and a shouter;
Streetcar squeals like trombone overtones. By the shuttered door
Of an abandoned smoke shop, two denizens of the lesser order
Of Thrones or Dominations toss pennies at a crack in the sidewalk.
Time on their hands, they loiter in conspicuous violation
Of universal law and normative moral intuition.
Theirs is neither power nor glory. Theirs is the holy boredom
That hovers like incense over the hierarchies of creation.
No cause for alarm. Brass knuckles are redundant here. Snap
Your fingers forever on the backbeat, never on the one or the three.

Margie

Things turn ugly. Call it the entropy of beauty.
Just when the dance gets hot, somebody flashes a knife.
Just when the night sky emerges moonless from the smudge
Of twilight, a siren sounds and everyone goes under.
In the dark, O Jesus is the password. You said it, pal.
When the lights come on: blood on the sheets.
Come out of the closet with your blackjack
And your bottle of bleach. It's time for the wedding,
Time for the score to settle. Remember how we felt
When the trumpets lifted and riffed the midnight golden?
That moment sublimity burned its mark on our foreheads
And left us for dead. There's nothing now
But to wait for the hit man to show his decorous hand.

Baby Won't You Please Come Home

Because the telephone can't ring, she ignores the pistol in the closet.
She stays away from the bottle of pills, refuses to walk over the bridge.
Moment to moment, she considers what time feels like, passing
In and out of the alveoli, around and through the aorta.
It has ground glass in it, the finest abrasive brume.
The gibbous moon lays a sharp quadrangle on her bedroom floor—
She studies its boundaries intently. Light here, dark there. Just so.
Perfect, as though God etched it with his carpenter's right angle.
The moon itself: off-center, busted, color of a half-healed scab.
God's hands are filthy. But that piano with its crystal riffs—
On the radio it sounds so clean it could almost be a life.

Twenty-Four Robbers

Dispossessed is one way to put it. They broke in and took everything.
The story arrives like music from a Victrola smothered
With a fat silk pillow: muted. Somebody somewhere saw it.
Somebody else knew the driver. There were hacksaws and lockpicks,
Rumors of a pistol-whipping. Suddenly there was silver
On the pawnshop counter, bracelets and wedding rings.
Redistribution of wealth. Somebody drank a gimlet
At the corner bar and paid with a double sawbuck.
It was Robin Hood in a zoot suit. It was Ali Baba sliced in half.
They were having a party in the Avenues, Mardi Gras in June.
Cabs rolled in from the Boroughs. That's my steak knife.
Where'd you get that garter? Soup kitchens shut down early.
Posters of Marx appeared on the fence of the vacant lot:
To Each According To His Need. In the middle of a chorus
Somebody screaming: Open sesame. Open sesame . . .

I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town

Out this window on a moonless night, she can imagine
There might be a horizon, and the stars must know about it—
That's why they never stop moving. If she had the quick slide-arm
Of a trombone player, she could reach beyond the dark
She knows is a warehouse wall to take hold of it,
And that edge would cut her in half. That's the size of it.
The stations of her days are marked with pots of beans,
Plates of rice, the way the tired men lean on their elbows, eating.
They stink, but they have jobs. If an assembly line were long enough
It could stretch beyond the projects to some countryside
Where an unimaginable pastoral unfolds as far as the ocean,
Containing cows, perhaps, containing birds, containing trees.
Pack your bags, sweetheart. Or, screw it—just send for your things.

For Dancers Only

The scavengers of twilight turn up with almost nothing—
A lipstick tube, a broken saxophone reed—
And, for their trouble, the Captain breaks their thumbs.
What it takes to earn a living: get it right or not at all.
Get it from schoolboys on the street, Sign of the Horse,
Plastic bag of powder ten bucks, five bucks, one.
Supply and demand. Location. Profit margin.
Or are you just another dreamer, like your mother's cousin
Who thought he could sing? He ended up,
Where was it again? In an alley? At the bottom of the ocean?
Learn the moves. Don't step on any toes.
Have you got the beat? Give me your hand. I'll lead.

Le Jazz Hot

The finger of God comes down like whatever you care to call it—
Storm, or flame, or a chemical bolt of indifference—
What counts is the gesture, the color of light, the scar.
A sharkskin suit and wingtips in the closet.
A garter-belt and a condom in the bureau drawer.
Conditions keep changing, one moment all essence,
The next all shit, and everything in between.
The snapshot on the table is heartless; you see in the eyes
Of the woman that she knows what ending means.
Closure is a crack in the chest like a rim-shot,
Syncopation of stop-time, a diminished chord in the brain.

The Lonesome Road

The black cars roll in their endless funeral line.
Somebody's on his way, going, going, gone—
Not home but back. Not passed away but shattered.
Black limousines like notes on a staff, hearse
Like a big bass clef. The tuba player lifts his load
Of dented brass at graveside. He blows
Three great dark notes, a minor triad.
Why is he always early? The good, he thinks,
They all die young. But when will the drummer show
With his bell and his snappy snare? He can't remember
Driving here, or where this big horn came from—
Only the music in the parlor, O Didn't He Ramble
On the gramophone. That, and the syncopation
Of tires on asphalt. Odor of alcohol, texture of felt,
Distant flavor of brass. That, and the cold counterpoint
Of a stethoscope on his chest. Breath out of tune, out of time.