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Preface to Andrea Rowen's "Suffer Wonder":

The story is that I was early to a gig waiting for my friend’s band to come on. I was alone in the bar, by myself with an early crowd at the Village Pub in Port Jeff. So I’m looking around seeing what’s going on and I noticed this strange looking guy there, wearing loafers and a blazer, amidst what is mostly a very casual crowd, also alone. I kept my distance because you know in a bar a chic alone starts talking to a guy alone and well it means something and even though I knew most everyone who usually comes and they’re alright he was new to the place I couldn’t muster any hospitality because of how he looked, so strange, so out of place, I mean this bar was near the railroad he really could be anybody

So I was listening to the band before my band and they were okay, palatable, holding my interest. Punky, punkedelic, and before I knew it they started getting all improvisational and they are making room, musically and spatially, for someone to come on stage and I turn around to see this guy with the oxford shirt and loafers hey maybe even a corduroy blazer with patches on the elbows, come up to the stage with his horn and start blowing that thing like he was an idea right out of John Coletrane's very own head

My mouth hung open in disbelief and rapture as he engaged rhythm and rhyme in tonal perfections squeaking and thumping from the nether dimensions until my level of shame and embarrassment rose to the level of my delight and just took wings and I had to fly out of the barroom into the car where the great realization that had I questioned, had I writhed to discover, had I suffered thru my misperceptions, had I welcomed his presence, I would have never put that conceptual barrier between us would have never judged

And the words tumbled off my pen onto a tiny notebook in the car in the dark to the already embodied rhythms of his music…

Suffer Wonder
by Andrea Rowen

Selling shortfolds
by the handful
Rapid picture
water baskets
High completions
over easy
Asking questions
shaping shelter
Asking questions
suffers wonder.

Rolling coils
under vacant
hallowed hallways -
serpent havens.
Better heavens
lie between us
Lay between us,
Over easy,
Love you, baby.

Humble blunder,
(dash it after)
Cold facts rumble
(touching ever)
Walking hundred,
Silent mindfuls,
Empty landfills -
crossing under.

Never worry,
Path between us
only sunders
lethal thunder -
Asking questions
suffers wonder

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