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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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“The Ghost Note” arises from the poet listening to “From Paris With Love” from Melody Gardot’s 2020 album Sunset in the Blue (pictured) [Decca Records]
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The Ghost Note
There’s a note at the end of the introduction
to Melody Gardot’s “From Paris with Love,”
towards which the strings rise, climbing up,
one step, two step, three, four…but the last note,
the note you almost hear and would expect,
doesn’t come. If I’m right, it’s F to F-sharp,
A-sharp to C, and then a C-sharp your mind hears
or expects to hear, that remains unclear.
(I don’t know if you notice such things
or think, hey, that sounds…strange?)
Instead, when the last note comes sliding in,
it’s not a simple C, not C-sharp flat, but off
in a way that makes your heart sink a little.
We didn’t reach it. We were close, about to be
in that bright, predictable soundscape…nope.
It holds there, going back and forth, but then,
the slow, melancholy shuffle of the song begins,
and the poet tells her story. And the story is of love,
the story is of longing, the way we reach and try.
The song is not about success, not about happiness,
achieving a goal, receiving the wish. It’s about that note.
It’s about “drink to life as if there is no end.”
It’s about “maybe one day I will see you…” what’s missing,
what’s possible, but still in the space of that note,
not there. It’s Faulkner saying to the artist:
“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection,
so I rate us on our splendid failure to do the impossible.”
It’s Plato’s realm of the forms: perfect chair, perfect justice,
perfect love, but not in this world. Yet, we have this note,
this note that points, this note that brings us close,
this note that is not the note we expected or wanted,
but the one we received, the blue note, the grace note.
That’s where the song lives. That’s where the poem begins.
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Listen to the poet read “The Ghost Note”
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Listen to the 2020 recording of “From Paris With Love” from Melody Gardo’t album Sunset in the Blue [Decca Records].
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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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The poet’s collection, The Blue Island
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