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Trading Fours with Douglas Cole is an occasional series of the writer’s poetic interpretations of jazz recordings and film
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Erzsebet Nagy SAAR, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Night Bird
I had a little radio up on top of the refrigerator, and I turned it on as the sunlight went and the world filled up with darkness. I listened to a jazz station and smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. Chet Baker came on, playing a song called Night Bird, and I listened as he laid down the first few statements, repeated them, and then took flight. Right out of whatever that song was originally about, whatever you could have written down, he took off on his own. Free of the structure. Improvising but never wrong, every choice fluid and graceful. He flew, smooth and connected, tethered to the other players but far away, too, because he was flying up and out of it. And I went with him and closed my eyes and knew in the dark sky sound I am going and go and boundless go just like that night bird flying with no walls and no doors and no home at all—just going and going in all directions in the endless dream. Then whatever I was hearing sort of fell back, and I felt myself pulling away and going further and reaching higher and holding there in such beautiful stillness true and pure and perfectly poised—free for as long as I wanted. It was an old trick of the mind I’d mastered in prison. Then, a kind of lightning branched out, winds rolled again, and the whole world trembled into being again. Here I was back in the nerve and the blood and the body of sound, and like a friend speaking to me, that trumpet player’s voice put me right back in my little kitchen space with all his trumpet variations concluded.
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(Excerpted from The White Field, published by Touchpoint Press, 2020)
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Listen to Douglas Cole read this poem
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Listen to the 1980 recording of Chet Baker playing “Night Bird,” a composition by the pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, with Maurizio Giammarco (tenor sax), Ricardo Del Fra (bass) and Roberto Gatto (drums)
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photo by Jenn Merritt
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Douglas Cole has published six collections of poetry and The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in several anthologies as well as journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Poetry International, The Galway Review, Bitter Oleander, Chiron, Louisiana Literature, Slipstream, as well Spanish translations of work (translated by Maria Del Castillo Sucerquia) in La Cabra Montes. He is a regular contributor to Mythaixs, an online journal, where in addition to his fiction and essays, his interviews with notable writers, artists and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blond, Flash Count Diary) and Tim Reynolds (T3 and The Dave Matthews Band) have been popular contributions. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart and Best of the Net and received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. Click here to visit his website.
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