“Some time in the early morning, Michael Smith, a twenty year old factory worker
jumped, fell or was pushed from the overpass onto The John C. Lodge.
He died shortly after being taken to Mercy General Hospital. ”
–The Detroit Free Press
Fishtown kid, always wiping his nose.
eating two-for-a-dollar burgers at White Castle,
unloading bumpers from frozen boxcars.
He was already sitting in with some serious players.
We teased him about his baby face,
how he looked like Chet Baker, and still didn’t shave,
Little Honey Head, too young to legally drink.
I know what I’m doing, he’d smile–, I’m just chippin,’
like the song goes–“ain’t nobody’s business but my own.”
He would come home, change, have a taste, then
practice in his room for hours, playing along
with Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young,
woodshedding with the elders, he used to say.
He had an old bootleg tape of the 1957 date—
Lester’s solo to Billy Holiday when she sings–
He wears high draped pants, stripes are really yellow,
and when he starts in to love me he’s so fine and mellow.
When Lester played, you could hear the words,
when Holiday sang, she phrased like a horn player.
Prez and Lady Day– they renamed each other.
No romance to the high life, Little Mike, Billy would tell you.
Using is like living in an iron lung.
Prez was living on sips of buttermilk and Cracker Jack,
gin and a sherry chaser, just fired from Birdland.
The only one who had to sit for the whole session,
but he jumped up to take a thirty nine second solo
that had the sound men in tears.
He was behind Billy, holding his saxophone almost horizontal,
rocking the lover he never made love to in the lap of memories
that went back twenty years to when they first did the song,
pouring the honey of those old used to be’s into Billy’s waiting ears.
“What A Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Ain’t misbehavin,”
“I Get a Kick Out if You.”
She swayed a barely visible descant of counterpoint,
gestures, on top of his lines, phrasing
behind the beat, pausing in the curves between the notes.
She nodded the pleasure of inevitable yes’s
with little shakes of her head: it doesn’t get any better than this,
but more will never be enough.
Then she sipped a breath, wet her lips slowly, and took her turn.
Three years since they’d seen each other.
No romance to the high life.
Lester would be gone in a year and Billy two months later.
Mike played the solo until he could turn it inside out,
until he could find it in the dark,
hear the catch in its breath, its syncopated heartbeat,
as it shifted, arched, and coasted to its finish,
The unconsumated finality of things.
if I could have been there when they found him
fingers barely twitching and his eyes still open,
before the sirens, and strangers’ voices,
maybe I could have hummed Lester’s solo in his ears.
Little Honey Head, he wanted it all, when more was not enough,
And he was like a woman:
He fell in love through his ears.