burgundy
for oliver jones & ranee lee

 

88 streetlamps, lit and unlit, yellow and black

alternate down atwater street

black & yellow ivories

bissect little burgundy

a lily melody lilts, unsteady

atop a boozy boogie-woogie

church families bless a bitter welfare

hustlers hover over rum & cokes

lights of burgundy

bops and weeps this harsh haven to sleep

88 piano keys

be the infinite sum and seam

of our history

ranee lee intones a memory, a black blue note

oped into a rogue hope, a hounded bounty, a new canaan

creolity, a congregation to be-

lieve in this sound foundation, this air beneath our feat

 

 

 

burgundy / little burgundy / likka burg / p'tit bourgogne / petite bourgogne: west-end montreal quarter

(=quartier). a concrete crucible sunk under westmount (where former prime-ministers and capone-associated bootleggers reside).  historic seat of the black community. burgundy borders the cp railway tracks. its location was convenient for the west-indian and american sleeping-car porters. where the jazz scene had its throne: rockhead's paradise, atop which rufus rockhead lounged. where the city's oldest black congregation (strong with ebon scotians) ambles to its sandstone church every sunday: uniton united.

 

lights of burgundy: album by jazz pianist oliver jones.

ranee lee: montreal jazz vocalist, drummer, tenor saxophonist (via nyc).

 

---

  

coming thru slaughter

for fats domino

 

when slow-rolling, slow-to-anger rivers

surged & sloshed mud, debris, stray piano-keys

up blueberry hill, when bloated corpses bobbed thru storyville

 

where sousaphones circular bells once beamed: brass suns

where low yellows, high browns cakewalked through town

where barrelhouse boogies, tickled by professors of the ivories

 

tinkled the cration myth of true democracy: jazz, in whose annals

creole sports, dangerous as razors, flashed diamond grins

when floods sloshed through ol blu Orleans

 

life floated, treaded the mud of its origins. pharoah

hard-hearted, budged not from his white house. hollywood

sped no seraphic cavalry. marie laveau

 

conjured no black star liner, no great black ark, no sun-ship

outlined in molten anger against the azure

when floods sloshed through ol new orleans

 

bloated corpses floated, stank, and sank

in a mud-gumbo of stray piano-keys, broken steeples, history

stank, and sank into new life's brazen glitter flitting

 

over creation's ever-river rolling

 

---

 

X over

 

in a santa-claus sleigh

 

jingling down st-

 

antoine st.

 

(montreal)

 

a rotund count

 

basie, in 19

 

24, winter hinter

 

landed: pg X, good morning blues. (autobio told thru a-

 

frican medium. a-

 

lbert murray to a-

 

nonymous reader a

 

sojourner, dreamer, seeker a-

 

river at the a-

 

xis a-

 

t the x.

 

crux. cross. the dread reader, straight chaser

 

after shades, shadows, ebon ghosts

 

follows jazz narrative fugues thru

 

ifs, breaks, smears, thru

 

this nebulous north of somewhere, this neige, this enfer, this nether where

 

basie reminiscing, murray chanelling, i reading murray & re

 

writing, & you meandereading thru me, we

 

four cardinal comers inter

 

sect in th elect

 

trickster inter-

 

stices twixt

 

sent hences, hexes, we X

 

memory and forget

 

we cross

 

pasts.

 

---

 

kaie kellough is a montr¨¦al writer via calgary & vancouver.  his first book of poems was lettricity (cumulus 04).  his latest book, maple leaf rag, will appear april 2010 (arbeiter ring).  kaie has published and presented his work from c to c, b.c. to q.c. to n.s. & into the u.s. kaie is presently at work on a novel.