Chidago Canyon Petroglyph
5/28/20 Two Blocks from the Floyd Murder
for Carei Thomas
Today’s poem is a single-engine plane
experimenting with clouds. It could be
1937 again, and nothing is new.
In Carei’s portrait, mars black
pleats his shirt with atonal ripples;
a background of cadmium orange
with a toxic label on the paint tube.
Trees filter the barest hint of a moon,
it’s almost not night.
Today’s poem remembers Hafez
spilling wine, a marvel of Shiraz
like blood on his prayer rug.
This poem names the trees. It names
my friend’s ankle braces and cane,
the cuff his arm went through.
Every poem sets its own traps. In this one,
death was the surprise between
A Love Supreme (he was always humming),
and the Hallelujah Chorus. His toe caught,
his cane couldn’t keep him from
pitching into the curb. In no time
earth had hijacked another one.
_______________
John Minczeski
Review by Kathy Nelson
This elegy has the quality of a jazz improvisation, which is appropriate since it eulogizes the jazz pianist and composer, Carei Thomas. “Today’s poem is a single-engine plane / experimenting with clouds” it begins, signaling that this poem will move associatively and in surprising ways. Indeed, the poem begins as ekphrasis, then moves to a prefiguring image of Hafez spilling wine (“like blood”) on his prayer rug, then to a musical portrait of Carei Thomas and, finally, to his fatal fall.
This poet trusts his reader. He deftly contextualizes Thomas’s death in the title; he adroitly withholds the straightforward revelation of the cause of death until the end of the poem, resisting narrative; he employs the inherent imbalance in the tercet to convey the precarious balance that leads to disaster. But he skillfully supports the reader’s movement through the poem by means of anaphora (“Today’s poem” and its variations “This poem” and “Every poem.”)