My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 59

By
YUSEF
KOMUNYAKAA

The Candlelight Lounge

Ficre’s Flow

All the little doors unlock
in the brain as the saxophone
nudges the organ & trap drums
till an echo of The Great Migration
tiptoes up & down the bass line.

Are the big fish caught in a current
or eating little fish behind the double
darkness of a cave that goes back

Faces in semi-dark cluster around
a solo, edging toward a town of steel
& car lines driven by conveyor belts.
But now only a sign stutters across
the Delaware, saying, Trenton Makes,
The World Takes. With one eye
on the players at the Candlelight
& the other on televised Olympians
home is a Saturday afternoon
around the kidney-shaped bar.
These songs run along dirt roads
& highways, crisscross lonely seas
& scale mountains, traverse skies
& underworlds of neon honkytonk,
wherever blues dare to travel.
A swimmer climbs a diving board
in Beijing, does a springy dance
on the edge, turns her head
towards us, & seems to say, Okay
you guys, now see if you can play this.
She executes a backflip,
a triple spin, a half twist,
suspended between now & then,
& jackknives through the water,
& it is exactly what pours out of the horn.

58

— For Larry Hilton

to a boy gazing at a pictograph
in Eritrea? Colors are monarchs
fallen into almost hidden motion
brushed underneath a language
of troubled waters, an incursion
of hues speaking across borders
on the edge of bebop & third stream,
but to see & listen so deeply is to go
all the way & return with cinnabar
& Egyptian blue on the fingertips.
A polychromatic silence breathes
across the wide canvas till a melody
of gangling light turns subterranean
among the school of pigments,
& we sometimes talk around
the edges of things as fish swim
to the center, stopped for a long
moment, & then they continue
swimming through the colors,
nibbling the air, & I want to say,
Ficre, we are held in your flow.