For James Hazard, a little late

I’m listening to Johnny Hodges pour himself
into that alto sax like bourbon into a tumbler—
sweet, intoxicating fire—and wondering
whether you’d ever made note of him,
wondering whether he ever took the stage
at the Hoosier Theatre. Or maybe you drove
from Whiting to the Crown Propeller Lounge
in Chicago to see him. It’s not like you hadn’t
made the trip before in that pontoon of a car.
And why should this matter? Decades after
our paths intersected for the length of a semester,
I see the parallels. If only I knew who I was
when I knew you. But then, of course,
I didn’t really know you, despite the fact
that your love of poetry set me going
like a fat gold watch, my mind spinning
with exhilaration like a second hand, words,
even now, still tick-tick-ticking in my brain
like a second heart. Or like the soft click-
click-click of a saxophone’s keys.

	a rejoinder to Brett Elizabeth Jenkins’s “Marrying the Wind”

I was enamored of the wind,
in early days—the way she billowed
my curtains, chased clouds merrily
across a blue sky, ran airy fingers

through my hair. And the music! Playing chimes
like an angel and leaves like chimes, turning
signposts into her instruments, thin tune of a tin
whistle or deep-throated hum of a didjeridoo.

But no marriage is perfect. She was careless
of my papers. Sometimes she blew one way
in the morning and another at night. But
then the violence started, knocking over

billboards, churches, old ladies, houses,
roaring as she stormed about in fits of rage. 
Still, she could be sweet sometimes, holding up
a kid’s kite, obligingly filling the canvas sheets

of sailboats, caressing my cheek. How could I
not keep loving the wind? But who can live
with such mood swings, such unpredictability?
At least, I tell myself, we never had children. 
                        

Sometimes when she says breathe,
I hear grieve. Grieve freely. Grieve easy.
Grieve fire. As I live and grieve.
The pebble in the pocket of my womb
didn’t breathe a word of its existence.
How long had it lain there, like a lost
butterscotch, gathering the lint of my life?
Womb sounds like wound. Had the pellet
been there all along? The pocket was ruined,
that much was sure. The belly must be unzipped,
the pocket with its pernicious pebble removed.
What is the appropriate way to say goodbye
to something you never loved? I’ve cried more
over squandered enchiladas. Still, I’ve lost
a part of me, useless appendage though it was,
and there’s a sadness in that, like someone
has turned out a light in a room I never entered.
Just grieve, I hear her say. And so I do,
drawing in the sweetness of just in time
and forcing out the dread of what if.