Lu Watters: Blues Over Bodega
Louis Armstrong called him the greatest cornet player in the history of Dixieland, but he’d retired by the time I met him. Lu and I drank cheap sherry out of gallon bottles and talked about literature. He was a Henry Miller fan. Lu drove north to Anderson the year I taught there. He was having an affair with a red-head who claimed she was descended from the Lost Continent of Mu. I remember Lu standing in a fine rain, practicing, preparing for a comeback in a canyon west of Anderson, the notes echoing around us. He wanted to raise money to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant at...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of Jan. 7 (Inspiration)
Many wishes for a wonderful new year! We are back from the holiday season, feeling refreshed and ready to set upon new paths and new creative goals. With that in mind, we will devote two weeks to the sources of artistic inspiration, beginning with poems by two poets, Robert Lavett Smith and Deborah H. Doolittle. Robert Lavett Smith’s “Maud Gonne” looks at the hold that unrequited love had on William Butler Yeats and how it influenced his poetry. Smith’s “Bird and Cows” shows us jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker, playing a nighttime piece...
Read MoreThe Woman with Green Eyes
“The Girl with Green Eyes” by Henri Matisse a Madam X with no other name, like most of Matisse’s women stares back at him; she’s hardly camera-shy. She has donned a special hat for the occasion, deep-crowned and shallow-brimmed with a contrasting riband. You can barely tell that she parts her auburn hair on the side. Her neck is completely covered up to her chin by a white collar, stiff as a wooden bobbin, but definitely larger than life size. She refuses to smile. Perhaps, it is because her lipstick has smeared the corners of her mouth. Or she is...
Read MoreHow to Read a Cat
Marguerite Matisse (“Girl with a Black Cat”) by Henri Matisse She holds the cat in her lap like an open book she has often stooped to read. She’d read it now, if she had one more set of hands. Instead, she runs her hands over the soft fur as if her fingers could read this new kind of Braille, decode the Morse signals of its purr that tumble through its lush coat. In other words, anagrams of contentment written in the darkest kind of ink. The fact that it is all black and sleeps on her lap almost everyday has taught her to sit up in her straight back chair, ignore the...
Read MoreBird and Cows
Poem inspired by the Ken Burns film, “Jazz.” Someone has told him, half in jest, that cows Are very fond of music. Now the “Bird,” Car idling in a midnight pasture, blows Cool alto sax for an astonished herd. Bewildered livestock turn their gaze horn-ward, The jazz man’s leaning figure doubled in The turgid depths of bovine eyes, each chord A galaxy poised waiting to begin. The horn’s unfurling cry is almost human, Decries the agony of what it means To be a cow — and what to be a man — What grand improvisations lie between. The onyx sky transcribes ascending bars Brilliant...
Read MoreMaud Gonne
“…I strove To love you in the old high way of love….” —W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse” In all the photographs her hair is dark, Simply restrained, perhaps a trifle wild; Her eyes — dark too — are eyes that have beguiled A poet’s heart, and known it. Their cold spark Blazes down decades, the emblazoned arc Of meteors through Celtic...
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