...LISTEN (a poem after Jan Garbarek/Thomas Transtromer)

I started this poem between August and October 1985. That was the time when I had just moved into my flat in Belsize Park, alone. I was listening to Jan Garbarek's new album, It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice, in which each of the tunes is based on, and titled with a line from, a Tomas Transtromer poem. There is a lot of inward looking in there, and it was resonating with me at that time, for reasons I got then, but understand a lot better now. It wasn't based strictly on either the title track, nor on "One Day In March I Go Down To The Sea And Listen", which is why the title has its ellipsis at the start. I know I have made notes for both those other titles, but I haven't found them yet.

...Listen was published in December 1987, as part of 'Five Jazz Poems' in Hollands Maandblad, which, as I've said before here, was one of my favourite of my all poetry publications. I've continued to write poems when the jazz music takes me. I was putting some together, maybe for a 30th anniversary at Hollands Maandblad, or for this blog, or something else, when I started looking at this one again. And when I did I reworked it considerably. In fact, what I hear in it now is a lot of 'Witchi-Tai-To', the Jim Pepper tune, in Garbarek's later version, not the one with Bobo Stenson in 1973. It's got the feel of a ritualistic chant, which is an approach to a feeling of aloneness from another side. It was a gray voice I was hearing, and I was not sure it was OK.


...LISTEN
                   after Tomas Transtromer via Jan Garbarek

 

You're learning

something you've known

long time gone

crazy with rain

falling in waves

driving away

wipers beat

blinking not

crying but

trying to

make her repeat

what you don't

want to hear

but you think

needs to

appear & fill

spaces

between you

still

.

so you'll feel

pain, know

enough to

push her

away, though

she's not

there in the

other seat

so push instead

the last dry

grain of love

to a place

beyond care

you'll never

find again

not in this

rain & then

.

you can

drift

& drift away

away with

& drift away with

the rain

drift

away.