In a little town on the Hudson
In a dark room in the back of the Avalon
Luminous cocoons hang around Joanna Mattrey.
From her violin the bell of a horn has sprouted.
She generates a staticy thunder with her right foot
While her left foot pushes against gravity.
Outside blue light halos around Avalon.
I'll walk it back. Two blocks away, just off Main
There is a park with a blue book on a bench
That someone abandoned like a baby:
Alcoholics Anonymous. Around the corner
In front of a small cafe advertising New York cuisine
A distinguished-looking elderly Black guy
In a brown houndstooth tweed suit
Is crooning the blues.
I walk past the closed store fronts.
With the first residential block
I hit an old sidewalk of bluestone slabs
With crabgrass growing between the stones.
I turn around because I want to be on time.
I may be old but the evening is young.
I am waiting to cross a street,
Waiting for the light to turn,
And then it does but the window of a car rolls down
A man's hand reaches out
With a fat gold ring in his palm.
He says "I need money."
The light changes. The car screeches away.
None of this hangs together
Until later when Joanna Mattrey
Produces such music from her violin
That I have never heard,
While conjuring a staticy thunder with her right foot
While her left foot pushes against gravity.
During the break I am standing outside talking to a woman
Who says she knows some sanSkrit
So I ask her to say something and she says,
Samdhi vigraha yostul yayam vrddhau samdhi mupeyatl.
I ask what it means.
She says, Choose love not war.
I ask her to say it again.
(The world doesn't speak English, at least not tonight.)
.........................
Everything that I included in this poem happened pretty much as described except that what happened at the Avalon was magnified, not exaggerated. There is a difference. I didn't make anything up. Neither did I try to normalize it because there was nothing normal about it. I was trying to communicate how I experienced both the performer and her performance as transcendent or larger than life. The "luminous cocoons" were translucent hollow paper pod-like constructions suspended from the ceiling, with lights inside them that changed colors. But how I perceived them was closer to cocoons, which they resemble, plus I have have been writing about the stages of butterfly's metamorphosis, with its 4 distinct stages: egg, larva, chrysalis, butterfly. As far as her conjuring thunder and pushing against gravity and the horn sprouting from her violin, she did create a loud rumbling static effect with a pedal and there was a horn inexplicably protruding from her violin.
The poem starts out with my evening at the Avalon (in Catskill) and replays the time I spent in town, just off, but mostly on, Main Street, sharing some of what I experienced there while waiting for the doors to open for the show. The middle of the poem is mostly selective reporting of real random events. The poem ends with the woman quoting sanSkrit, which is also based on a real encounter. The actual translation was something like: If a King can choose love or war, he should choose love. That message resonated with me because I blame a lot of the problems and dysfunction in this country on bad choices. across the board and at every level of society. And that goes back to something I wrote in another recent post about one of the wisdoms that comes through in the film "Forrest Gump", that we are, for the most part, responsible for what we do next. Not always, but, I would argue, most of the time. (The "king" in the sanSkrit quote, like the "superior man" in the I-Ching, symbolizes the higher self.)
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