Lady's Blues in Winter

Lady in winter,
thin, diminuendo,
head nodding forward,
holding on, almost gone
like the last few leaves drift.

Almost blowed and gone.

Lady in winter
flutters to the room, blues
measured in her weary walk,
fragile bones. She smiles
at Papa, Count, and Sweets.
Little Jazz cocks his eyebrow,
winks, and sets his hat back neat.

She drifts past the piano, sways
the specter of swing time,
fingers snap. She sits, sings.
Her blues come back
in rasp and slip of notes,
dragging trains of sinuous satin
rife with curve and slur.
Her bright eyes know love
in vain. The blues ain’t nothin
but a pain in your heart,
slid smooth smoky slow,
deliberate to the break.

Her sentinels stand spraddle-legged,
axes bent, bodies back, lips curve,
reeds whisper almost gone, almost
blowed and gone, sweet swing time
subsumed by the shape of jazz
shifting to a dissonant future.

Bean, aging patriarch,
Frog, soft-hearted brute,
blow sweet fading grace,

but Prez is indifferent to time
or custom. Prez is anachronistic,
a master of time, at once on it
and outside it, almost gone
yet still insistent, Prez stands
battered by time and custom,
but never defeated,
blows timeless.

Prez holds on impeccably,
flowing back to Harlem
bright with promise,
mad with music,
clanging with rhythm.

Love locks them,
Lady’s eyes wide, head nodding,
locked in a vision of distant past.
Prez smiles big eyes for Lady.
Love flows between them
locked in blues before
the fall of time,
almost gone.