Welcome to poetryvlog.com
A weekly video reading of poetry by the poet.
Tiger Mouth Blues: In Which Henry Dreams of the Fire that Burned Django Reinhardt’s Left Hand
by William Glenn
The flames are as high and wide as a gypsy caravan,
and they whisper to Henry,
but he can’t understand the words. Something about
blood-types, Paris, and roasted leg of lamb
served on a mango couscous. Everything in this room
is elliptical. A small green table. A blue ceramic bowl
brimming with fish soup – the fish heads singing,
“Dinah . . . Is there anyone finer . . .
in the state of Carolina . . .” The blind undertaker
sits cross-legged in the corner in a wicker chair, his ears
burning. Marcel walks in with a butterfly net and a bouquet
of bloody thumbs, the rash on his face in the shape of Idaho.
My ankles hurt. The swelling grows and recedes in time
with the music, but I don’t understand this music. Henry
says I’m not supposed to be in his dream; he’s supposed
to be in mine. A blue jay slams into the plate-glass window
and drops down into the hedge. When he was a child,
Henry believed the floor of St. Ignatius Catholic Church
was made of lava, so he started climbing from pew to pew
towards the door. His French grandmother screamed at
him in some mysterious Alsace-Lorraine dialect. The Beatles
singing “Day Tripper” on the juke box at O’Reilly’s Pub
as Henry remembers his Gran-mama. But here,
in the tuberculosis sanatorium of his nightmare,
we are still waiting for some kind of sign. Are we really alive?
Does the dream grant us dispensation? Are the dancers
at the Hot Club de France bathed in blue milk and pearls?
Have the celluloid flowers any significance
beyond that of their own existence? A tuba plays the violin
and laughs with its eyes like Stéphane Grappelli.
The doorknobs shimmy under the orange carpet. Our bed
is full of Soba noodles, but La Reina doesn’t like the flavor.
“They taste like an after-taste,” she says. Henry closes
his eyes and shakes his head, rapidly, back and forth,
frothing at the mouth. The heat waves are still rising
off the tarmac. The airplane grows larger and larger
in the 98th floor window. What is a dream made of
and from where does it come? Everything in this place
hints at something else. But the roads lead nowhere.
Henry crossing over the Brooklyn Bridge
in a blackout. “My hands are no longer my own,”
he sings, and the fish heads giggle. Any moment now,
the iPod will explode into cherry blossoms. Henry
can’t handle this lack of understanding – that nothing
only makes sense in relation to its nothingness.
The wind rivets the sand to a plastic shoreline
in a Joseph Cornell box. The museum is dark
and quiet. In the deepening shadow of Henry’s dream,
mirror-water seeping out of limestone,
the indention of what used to be his life
suddenly filling up with the opening chords
of Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages.”