POETRY AND JAZZ WITH BILLY COLLINS

Thanks to Don Frese, my original partner when we had our Daybreak Express mail order company.
 
POETRY AND JAZZ WITH BILLY COLLINS:
 
Billy Collins has come out with a new collection of poetry, The Rain in Portugal, and included in it is the following poem:
 
1960
 
In the old joke,
the marriage counselor
tells the couple who never talk anymore
to go to a jazz club because at a jazz club
everyone talks during the bass solo.
 
But of course, no one starts talking
just because of a bass solo
or any other solo for that matter.
 
The quieter bass solo just reveals
the people in the club
who have been talking all along,
the same ones you can hear
on some well-known recordings.
 
Bill Evans, for example,
who is opening a new door into the piano
while some guy chats up his date
at one of the little tables in the back.
 
I have listened to that album
so many times I can anticipate the moment
of his drunken laugh
as if it were a strange note in the tune.
 
And so, anonymous man,
you have become part of my listening,
your romance a romance lost in the past
 
and a reminder somehow
that each member of that trio has died since then
and maybe so have you, and sadly, maybe she.
 
 

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