Notched in the Bow of a Wave

Notched in the Bow of a Wave

BY JOEL DIAS-PORTER
After she left
the first thing
Ahmad Jamal played
was a bridge:
he fingered water
falling over a cantilever
& made a dark blue truth
transparent.
I try to suspend belief
across a span of hand-
written notes.
At noon, I cross myself
over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh,
sauntering from Station Square
to Smithfield St
haunted by a smell
along the Monongahela.
These streets cobble stone
memories, work overtime
in my olfactories.
Once, my piano-playing
girlfriend fingered daisies
waving in a breeze.
Then in love with her Noes
I began sniffing everything.
But the florid truth is that
I gave her a ring
of rust on her windowsill.
A heart broken
like a line
in a poem.
My girl left me,
& Ahmad Jamal was playing
“Wave” on my iPod.
It’s probably not smart to admit this,
but what he didn’t play
came across loudest.
I only saw her hands
say goodbye because of
the beauty in my earbuds.
Then I nosed a wine-
bottle blue scarf
she’d left on the right arm
of a chair.
Be honest, would you
have sniffed it?
What song doesn’t long
for the long fingers of a pianist?
A cantilever here
only holds up meaning.
I smelled
farewell in a coffee shop
as she high-heeled east.
Sunlight buttered
loafing pedestrians,
shadowed crossing things
as I wondered whether
Jamal’s main fault
was living too long
and weathering,
if his main technique
was to cleave themes
or to refrain.
As he plays,
the heart gives out
a rapid repeat.
A piano bench pines to be dusted
with notes, can it buckle
up such wont?
Maybe
there are facets
of bridges
one will always truss,
something phonic
and unforgettable
about how they allow
us to cross.
A wave of daisies
in a vase —
how they ravel
aromatic in the mind.
Ahmad Jamal waving
across the room:
me damned, & roiling
underneath like a river.
Maybe I dreamt this.
But when I licked
my fingertips to turn the page,
they became daisies
pushing between bricks
on a twilit bridge.
Source: Poetry (June 2016)