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“Midnight Sun” by Molly Larson Cook

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Piano

“In the creative state a man … lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious…”
—E.M. Forster

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Taking Forster’s bucket
into the unknown
like Keith Jarrett

in Bremen sailing
into pianissimo

pedals and digits and the dust
of oblivion all summoned
to transform silence

into a path where
bees sting where
hearts bleed where
buckets slosh and spill

torqued with bop and bounce,
they teeter back toward
stillness.

……………………..first published in New Letters

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photo Roger Gordy

Steve Paul, a onetime jazz DJ and critic, retired from daily journalism after a career of more than 40 years and segued into literary and cultural biography. He’s the author of Hemingway at Eighteen (Chicago Review Press, 2017) and a forthcoming biography of the writer Evan S. Connell. His occasional columns on jazz topics appear in KC Studio, a regional arts magazine.

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Molly Larson Cook is an artist, writer, and jazz aficionado from Oregon, who studied art at Maine College of Art and in workshops on both coasts. She’s interested in the improvisational aspect of abstract expressionism and jazz.  When she’s not in the studio, she listens to live jazz any chance she gets.

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Listen to Keith Jarrett play “VII” from his 2016 performance recorded on the ECM album Budapest Concert, which was released in 2020

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