The V Poems

V Poem I

Where did she hear that voice?

In a whisper of wind running through a black forest
Catching the trees and their branches so soundly
When it brushed against leaves they would quiver in song
And coax her right into singing along

Where did she get that voice?

From her Sunday papers strewn out on the couch
As she read about concerts with bebop ballets
While drinking more Joe in late afternoons
As her brunch drifted into romantic swoons

Where did she put that voice?

Inside a bioluminescent sphere
Beneath jungle nests of enchanted birds
Then she freed all her angels to softly compete
In a musical game of hide and go seek

Where did she show that voice?

At the one and only Follies Désir
With muscular dancers of sybaritic intent
She would stage outrageous and way heated poses
With songs that would speak of ashes and roses

What is it about that voice?

It is about a forest of Sunday blues
It is about a sphere of lithesome desires
It is about the songstress named V
It is all about that mystery

V Poem II

I’m seeing you during the dawn of each spring
At the old jazz club where you dance and you sing
In the town of Chicago, it’s just up my street
With its saxophone dreams on the cusp of the beat

It’s the old Green Mill Lounge, right close to Rick’s
The keeper of records, the guardian of riffs
Near film palace ruins that once held the glow
Of the lovesick prayers of Greta Garbo

Where gangster guys of the past prohibition
Threw laundered cash like spent ammunition
Out of shadowy booths in obscure recesses
To cigarette girls in their smoking dresses

Where they stashed all the stuff, you can still dig the keep
Beneath the mirrored bar in a tunnel so deep
That when the coppers would stage their raids
The gun molls could hide in their very own caves

So flaunting and flapping your famous red boa
You’d enter the lounge like a great super nova
All around your neck, you’d swing your heirloom
At the height of your fashion in the antique room

Alive in the club, you’d be quite the presence
The sway of the diva, the mark of your essence
You’d be holding the space in the palm of your hand
Then setting it free to the sounds from your band

In there, we’d be hearing you sigh your love songs
As they purred up against the green-draped walls
A puff of your voice, your breathe in a note
Would be lifting the flame of the woebegone torch

Then you’d go modern and start to deliver
Those jolts to the nerves, that sweet techno shiver
We would not be heeding the shouts of last call
Instead we’d give in to the calls of encore

Then Saturday night would give way in the room
To the Sunday repose of a lounge afternoon
And of course you’d be there with your speakeasy hymn
To the gospel truth of the Hammond organ

So V when you’re starting to plot out your tour
Think of this spot where you’d cause such a stir
That the ghosts of the jazz will think that they’ve found
A voice from the past at the old Green Mill Lounge


V Poem III

We often would meet at Le Papillon Noir
Where all of our evenings were just like ce soir
The club was a kind of existential heaven
Scribbled notes to new jazz circa 1947

At Le Papillon Noir, we could talk until dawn
And tease the first one who fought back a yawn
Our thoughts and our words took various flights
Like swirls of moths in Parisian white lights.

The sound of the crowd was straight out of a cave
As political factions took what they gave
It amused us to watch them holding their grounds
As they threw lefts and rights like boxing ring clowns

For we were not this tempestuous sort
Our discussions would float with ascending import
Not of this earth, but more of the skies
We were talking in circles of butterflies

Her black licorice hair trimmed short but cut sweet
Showed a shock of blonde stripe curving to her right cheek
Where she shooed away smoke with her faux geisha fan
Which she fluttered quite like the butterfly can

In her Romeo suit and Godiva lace halter
She revealed a species that she had uncovered
Her burgundy boa flew free with her talking
Complementing her shoes that were not made for walking

She would gaze long and hard at some faraway dance
Then enter a semi-hypnotic trance
Then she spoke like a lepidopterous curator
On the well-traveled paths of the champagne migrator

We agreed that you could not quite pin down their colors
Monarch and viceroy and all of those others
All of which brought up the ultimate question
How many could dance on the head of a straight pin?

Now why would I speak of Le Papillon Noir?
While she glides through a space in my net at this hour?
Because she was you, but just to my eye
As her given name was Vanessa Cardui


V Poem IV

Remember when I found your rare silver V-inyl in its sealed bejeweled sleeve in that old theatre building where a resale shop now acts for the benefit of the Hospice of the Final Passion?
Remember how I came across your rare silver V-inyl in its sealed bejeweled sleeve on the lowest shelf of a record bin, inserted among several talking disks: My Lullaby Is a Scar: The Nocturnes of Anne Sexton; that infamous overview of Erica Jong entitled A Baptism of Moistened Tongues; that box set containing 15 sides of Leonard Cohen’s recent ringtones?
Remember how I was so thrilled, that I felt like a turntable running away with itself: how I exclaimed: it can’t be: these days, your rare silver V-inyl in its sealed bejeweled sleeve is going for even more than the last breath of Anastasia on eBay? but that when I started thumbing through the bin and found that Julie London classic Christmas Eve for Swinging Mistletoes, I knew that it had to be you?
Your rare silver V-inyl in its sealed bejeweled sleeve was Slow to Burn – like the engravings of a Swiss watchmaker on a platter of infinite space? The cover shot as if you were a funhouse mirror on the walls of a mythological tango hall in Paris: arms reflected hips reflected torso reflected chest reflected your short black hair like a scapular of Anais Nin reflected the angle of reflection that showed your naked face without your mask that reflected a sensuous priestess?
Well, I now have possession of the rare silver V-inyl … in its previously sealed bejeweled sleeve (see, when I brought it to my listening station, I had to slit open the sealed bejeweled sleeve as if I were a surgeon performing on a body of holy water).

Part II

But there were all these golden markings scratched into the smooth of the rare silver
V-inyl.  I could already hear the crackles of snapped poppings that would mar the echoes of your voice as you pressed your lips to the whispers of a song.

Still, I had to hear it.  And as the needle caught the groove, I heard, repeatedly: “Joe Sent Me.  Joe Sent Me.  Joe Sent Me.  Joe Sent Me,” as if, all along, your rare silver
V-inyl in its sealed bejeweled sleeve had held the labyrinthine hieroglyphics of secret passwords to the chambers of the heart of your soul.

Listen, V.

I’m in
Your spin

All yours,

Le Crochet



V Poem V
“Cherries In the Snow”

This timeless winter, the artist greets the view
from her studio window, and imagines
what she might see if the tarnish of the city
were scraped cleanly off the bone-white snow.

This timeless winter, she sees the cleansed snow
accepting then capturing then displaying
the fall of virgin flakes like whittlings of ivory—
her quintessential landscape for lustrous daydreams.

This timeless winter, she is seeing beads of red
like the blood of love might melt hard ice:
a flashing stoplight, the disk of a cola ad,
a drifting balloon from a solstice parade.

This timeless winter, she sees a neon script
imprinted on the picture window of a candy store.
that copies itself in reflections on the snow
and to her eyes, the calligraphy streams red

This timeless winter, she sees how children
or funny lovers could pluck out red balls
from out of the snow, as if they had icicle stems,
and take a bittersweet lick right before the pitch.

This waning winter, she is seeing then
A growth of spring like innocence regained
What’s the intention? she thinks that she knows
When nature forgives, she reaps when it snows.

V Poem VI

“Give Myself To You”

How would it be if you had once wrote
the very best song of the years?
A song you could feel that would always evoke
a mood of hushed longing with tears.

How would it be if you were to sing
the most elegant song of them all?
If the vinyl that carried your voice were to bring
the lilt of nostalgic recall.

What if this song were cast in two parts
first blowing smooth at the jazzy Five Spot?
Kicking it off as your sweet voice departs
up into moves that are cool but so hot.

What if the song was of such a name
it would weave through the rhythmical flow?
So you could repeat it again and the same
as a spooky enchantment would go.

How would it be if you breathed out a line
of words in a secret suggestion?
As your language of mist that is hard to define
still speaks of romantic connection.

In the spin of these words that you whisper in time
to the saxophone calls when you beckon once more
As electric piano rings out with its chime …
… but what if the song were to end on this score?

Now what if the song contained a fresh start
taking a turn into postmodern dance?
Not to the feet, but go straight to the heart
as you echo the name like a trance.

Would the piano now play a set block of chords
with a lift to the sound of two notes?
That cue to an organ, to urge the song towards
the reach of your voice as it floats.




V Poem VI (cont’d)

Would there be phrases you once again sigh
in a sort of ethereal murmur?
Phrases with words we discern by and by
but dissolve like a far distant rumor.

Would there be words like the “hurt” of a “kiss”
The pull of “a force of gravity”?
“ ’til there’s nothing left,” and no more than this
in a shadow dance of mystery.

By now should we get what the song really means
a photomontage in creation?
Conjuring spells that set up the scenes
for slides of hallucination:

You stare out to us as if behind the screen of a daguerreotype in motion.
You draw the antique camera into you as it flickers scratches in its close up.
Your stare is intensely bemused as if you are watching the fin de siècle unwind before you.
Your oriental fan, your strapped halter top, your suit pressed striped, your disco platform shoes.
Your short hair in the boyish girl cut with a stray blonde streak on your forehead.
You are now held in the view of another camera, stilled in a frozen pose from an exotic dance.
Your head with its girlish boy cut appears brushed backward into a red feather boa.
Your dancers bend to you or grasp onto you as if beholding a goddess of peacocks.
Your eyes are closed on your face of the night that shows an expression of gracile ecstasy.
Your mood changes now as another camera moves in to see you sitting on a doorstep.
Your hair has grown out and dresses your shoulders in charcoal light.
Your face, too, takes on the etchings of the charcoal light with the touch of your smile.
You are everyone’s girlfriend who waits at the door for a timeless date.

How would it be if you had once wrote
the very best song to a tee?
But from passage to passage and note after note
nobody knew it but me.


V Poem VII

“Mouth to Mouth”
“You can free/the angel in me”

I wonder if this angel of yours parted touching the strings of a gilded harp, singing a Latinate chorus, flapping rococo wings, crowned with a nimbus of silvery gold.

Or maybe this angel of yours flew out of the echo chambers of your crimson heart, then waved farewell over your “quintessential landscape”, with its contours that ground the soulwork of your music.

Angel of antiquity.  Angel of a new age.  Or the angel on the tip of your tongue.


V Poem VIII

“A Little Bit of Pain”

“Even angels make mistakes”

Flubbing a note in the heralding of a trumpet
Slipping on a cloud like a juggler on ice.
Botching the name of an inspired prophet.
Foretelling an event that is lost in the future.
Burning a wingtip on a lick of hellfire.
Failing to rescue a martyr in distress.
Plucking at a harp that sheds its strings.
Guarding a mannequin empty of soul.
Or,
Forgetting the pain of an arrow to the heart.

V Poems IX
“Near the Black Forest”

Black is the new black to the dark of these woods –
black beauty renewing itself in time with the seasons,
so that this forest before us will continue in depth
along the ancestral grounds of hill and valley.

Here we wait at the head of the trail
for our musical guide, one Horst Jankowski,
to lay down light jazz like crumbles of gingerbread:
he calls the tune “A Walk in the Black Forest.”

Onto winding pathways on our steady jaunt
we will go, whistling along to his merry bop,
like carved wooden birds with chirps in their throats
who pop out of clocks to tweet out the hours.

We remember, now, to wind our watches
so we won’t lose ourselves to timeless stepping
when deep in our hike under roofings of leaves
that will lead us through shadows in the halls of the trees.

What will come up in our mystery walk?
Mythical stag?  Bears in liederhosen?  Stray German shepherd?
Then we’ve heard tell from old forest lore
of an inmost haunt called the Sacher Torte haus.

“Which witch is which?” we are asking ourselves
as we’re fixing the straps on our hardy backpacks.
A wicked crone with her pastry snare
who grabs vagrant kinder with ornery sweet teeth?

Or a svelte ethereal new age witch
who holds court on her captive audience
as she’s held erect on a circling pedestal
in her sinuous twist like a black licorice stick.

They say she’s reflected on a bank of TVs
that eye her dance like electric voyeurs.
Her crowd is lured by her song of entrancement
like the nightly murmurs from a forest bed.

And it’s said they writhe slowly in honour of her
in their tight black leather and slick vinyl wear.
Full metal zippers that never catch skin
are opened with pleasure by well-oiled hands.

Now that might be a treat to find on the trail:
go from hiking the woods to hitting the club:
toss off our watches to join in the dance
and never seeking to find our way home.

Black is the new black to the dark of her woods –
black beauty renewing herself in time with the seasons.
Oh bewitching pulse at the heart of this forest,
give us the fire in your stove of desire!