One more...

[matt_doyle]

... and that'll be it for poetry re-posts today, although maybe not for other posts.

Jazz Duet

 

It’d be raw and liquid and improvisatory,

made for rooms filled with red

and smoky light, the graceful silhouette

you cast against the wall, the smooth,

deliberate curve of hip and side and breast

like an instrument waiting to be played. 

We feel out the harmonies

in the spaces between us,

your hands wringing out tension from each nerve

 like a bass string, my fingers pressing

back-bone bumps like saxophone keys,

and playing chords in your body with a swelling, tremulous vibrato. 

The immediacy of it, the heat

of the music like the burn of liquor in your throat

when the saxophone’s clarion note shivers down you,

the velvet warmth of brass shaking in your blood,

pizzicato fingers working their way up and down

the scales, along me, the luminary sounds

of a rising duet creating something

synergistically more, the building crescendo trembling

 in the air for one sweet timeless second before

the music falls away into the short-breathed silence of

release.

Comments

[tulina.livejournal.com]

Hot, Matt. Hot. !!!

Also. Synergistically???

[matt_doyle]

Thanks!

Is that a translation request, or are you taking exception to my use of the word?

[tulina.livejournal.com]

I think I need a translation, yes.

[matt_doyle]

Synergy is where multiple things, interacting or working together, create a greater effect than the sum of their parts.

[tulina.livejournal.com]

Oooh okay.

[eamontoplease.livejournal.com]

It's appropriate that I should come across this poem on a day when I had a severe case of synergy wood.

[matt_doyle]

I do believe that's the first time I've heard the term 'synergy wood.'

[eamontoplease.livejournal.com]

Whaaaaat?! You told me not too long ago (okay, in 2006) that the concept of "synergy wood" never failed to amuse you. And I was all flattered 'n' shit, seeing as I came up with it. Not that you're not entitled to forget about something—I'm just surprised.

Getting back to poetry: Please join theysaid2 when you have a moment to spare. (Under no circumstances should you ever give those bastards at theysaid the time of day.)

[matt_doyle]

Hm. My memory must be failing me, then, which is somewhat unusual. 'Synergy wood' definitely sounds like something I would be perpetually amused by, but I still can't conjure up the context.

[eamontoplease.livejournal.com]

Okay, here's the context:

Sometime in 2006 I wrote a lengthy entry that began with "Synergy gives me wood," and went on to relate what an amazingly synergetic day I had just had.

Later that year I wrote another lengthy entry that related how, on a recent night, I had ended up broke, stranded, and annoyed in the middle of San Francisco's worst rainstorm in several years. I wrote that I had finally hailed a cab to escape the predicament, and that when I got in the cab, Michael Bublé was on the radio singing "I wanna go home. I've got to go home. Let me go home"—and I immediately got major synergy wood, because it was just so appropriate.

[matt_doyle]

And now, of course, that I have embarrassed myself, I totally remember that post. I think; I'm going to track it down to make sure I'm not lying. And yeah, I am definitely familiar with that phenomenon, and it does amuse me.

[eamontoplease.livejournal.com]

Alas, like all my public or semi-public entries, that one is long gone.

And no embarrassment necessary.

[matt_doyle]

Except that I forgot all your entries have been deleted or privatized, so I will not, in fact, be looking up the post. Oh well.

[eamontoplease.livejournal.com]

Simulpost. Oh, the shame.