One for the father
Notes on being the children of a sound mirror
Your wounds embossed on me, embracing me, and bossing me around some summer Sundays, they drown out the commemorative, the in-loving-memory until I’m everyone’s daughter, Persephone reviving the condition of belonging underneath and above but not with the thing, of being the warning that braces it for my impact, an impasse. A daunting, sometimes-egregious archetype in that, in letting them raise me from phantom seed into greenhouse orchid in Didion’s fiddle-tinted and dramamined Malibu, I raise them from settlement to demolition, I introduce them to you who are my salvation, you there in the ruins with a vertigo too valuable to steady. Then I idle alone with her in their glass house of fleurs du mal, maladaptive dreaming for the good of the letter, which needs to feel like it’s falling to find meaning in its steady climb. I know a woman named Fleur, she’s angry, lonely, beautiful, a velvet poppy trapped in a black-and-white movie scene. I meet here there from within my own name where I host a private union of many selves, method acting, an interior chorus, drowsy, alert, tilted toward to the heavens, and am most beautiful in the eyes and mouths of those who can sing without training, those who sing by ear, by dire necessity, like you, like being my father signing in the field to pass the hours before sundown hunger and singing on the porch to quell the after-work hunger. He did that for us.
Elsewhere it becomes brutalist, the lyricism of labor unfolding into mutiny or entertainment, too perfect, our beauty unsung and unrelenting, cuts them, slices them into envy-invalids and muted violet increments of yes, please say yes, be our field nigga forever. By accepting the razor in their hearts completely, I negate its edge. A man I used to love made an album called “Angels without Edges,” accompanying five of himselves to form a band and I auditioned, joined, defected, used to be his and am his angelic septet nagging the precipice with shatterproof glass to make it a destination not just bad destiny, or to have fallen limb by limb, as ripe fruit, from the tree Michael was climbing when he taunted, you’re missing out. That drug, that love of being alone in nature so much you have to be an angel or a killer, mercilessly reclusive like I’m doing a poem in the middle of a party scene but still talking to an op about my plans and alibis for next season. A man I’ll always love made the album “When Angels Speak of Love.” Let them, he declares, entering the intonation of solar flares striking delighted glass like an ax demanding bloom or wilt in the late afternoon of a whispered confession. Deception thwarted by self-possession, the urgent messages of seraphim. You wouldn’t have to come back if you never left, we hint, toward the birth of black ambient music, of that intense drift between staying and staging a huddle of jinxes to render the next chorus.
Did they hear it? Above the screen of the scar, did the scream’s pitch harmonize with the whisper and raise our fathers from the dead, from the zombie-bond back into the body to play Abide With Me Monk style, attentive spaciousness in the good bloodstained mink, which we call wine-blemished after the beating, which we call it winning the day, revisionist histories of daddy issue nation time after time. In French issue is another for exit, for a way out, best shooter, or how a problem is as good a source of a escapism as anything and our dads were both, that we escape through and with them, that the music we love is about their reentry into the kingdom as fools and madmen, their exile again, then returning again, and we call it jazz or whatever. They’re standing in a crucible or circle praying and crying together and we dance to that. Knowing excessive presence leaves no traces, a mantra, does not mean we stop calling out or stomping for those who are closer and more invasive in death because of this law. Some involuntary and mild-mannered tantrum makes us look up, look up toward them on a weekday afternoon in Los Angeles, and they’ve made us a shrine of fire. D’Angelo’s daughter is the first to notice the dragons encroaching and luring us further west. Kahlil holds his sleeping son in his arms while hosting the meeting. Georgia holds a newborn above the keyboard, becomes a wind chime, charmer of unreformed mercenaries. Ravi becomes John in the Coltrane line at the impromptu service. Severance in the orphanage of the everyday is music we can touch. When Joni tells us love is touching souls, nobody who isn’t starving argues, no caress is too small to enter its sphere and when it finds no edge, panic, retreat, return, every lifetime, another skyline shoveling ash into the hashtag wings until they’re baffled enough to resume course, flapping, flipping sandcastles in the hourglasses.
To help them along the path, past the echo and ego that traps them in dead-ends, I keep reminding everyone that James Brown was somebody’s father, Michael Jackson was somebody’s father, Mingus was somebody’s father, Miles, everybody’s terrible and perfect father, John Coltrane, the father, the son, the Holy Ghost, Malcolm, somebody’s father, she watched him get shot and fall backwards at the Audubon, she gasped forever and still life with Monk, somebody’s father, Prince, somebody’s son, and they all wander into the underworld with the same blunted shrug— there are enough broken families seeking refuge in our music to make another country.
An unreleased recording from my dad’s catalog