“Pleasant Twilight, 1969” — a poem by Sean Murphy

June 8th, 2022

Sun Ra, 1973

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Pleasant Twilight, 1969
…………(or, A Century of Sound in Under Four Minutes)

……………….“I wasn’t using any gasoline. I’m using sound.”
……………………………………………-Sun Ra

The meter already running, Sun Ra slams
out of the gate in his understated style—all
urgency and deep cool combined (his style):
Duke Ellington on acid, a transmission from Saturn
Big-Band style: an electric church alive with brass;
our maestro organ-izing, teetering as he was
on the edge of His Story, encyclopedic
with Giant Steps and new sounds conceived,
one inward eye seeing what would be, aware
on some level he was the one carrying a torch
to illuminate this new abnormal, notes falling
like sheets of fire—cold by the time they landed
on planet earth, He the Player to be named Later.

And suddenly Time itself stops, breaking down
like atoms emptying back into nothing,
John Gilmore marrying free jazz to funk—
switching from Coltrane to “Cold Sweat,”
jump-starting lives unlived and sounds not yet
conceived—and your ears, benefitting from
half a century’s hindsight, might detect
proto trip-hop, the big come-down
from set lists crammed with cosmic slop:
an entire history of sound broken down, grinding
to a halt, like new life in the process of becoming
reincarnated, a reminder that this is how life turns
into art and then imitates itself, different every time
and yet, somehow, ceaselessly the same.

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Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” as well as in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his chapbook, The Blackened Blues, is now available from Finishing Line Press. To learn more, visit seanmurphy.net