arizona goddam! (17)

arizona goddam!

alabama's gotten me so upset
tennessee made me lose my rest
& everybody knows about
mississippi goddam…
nina simone

dos cabesas, yr steep mountain slopes & granite
outcroppings, yr vegetated canyon floors provoke
strong feelings of arousal, attraction, & yes,
even love by more than just the white-tailed &
mule deer or eagles, golden & bald, the ranging
mountain lion, the beautiful collared lizard &
the peregrine falcon. u, dos cabesas, are,
indeed,a love object for arizona natives
imprinted by the wilderness with its uncultivated
spaces,its searing heat with that eerie desert
dust on its winds, a narcotic that makes them
susceptible to quaint hallucinations (daylight
savings time is a bolshevik plot),conservative
& highly distrusting of government. (goddam!)
where lawmen under the influence of frontier
fancy could take a hapless but convenient
outlaw straight from the lyrics of their state
song, a befuddled recidivist burglar named
ernesto arturo miranda, compel from him a

rape, etc., confession, make him write it down

& sign papers with a printed certification that

he “voluntarily & of my own free will, with no
threats, coercion or promises of immunity…” &
“full knowledge of … his)…legal rights” made
that confession, but failed to inform him of
his right to have an attorney present & of his
right to remain silent.(goddam!)
where in a season that saw even ronald reagan
bow to the inevitable winds of change by signed
the king holiday into law, three house republican
arizonans, including an “unevolved” john mccain
& that doyen of true american conservativism,
senator barry goldwater voted unequivocally no!
state lawmakers like sand lemmings followed suit.
babbitt, not sinclair lewis’ vacuous protagonist,
but a governor doing the right thing, signed an
executive order declaring a paid king holiday.
but 7 months & 24 days later, soon-to-be-

impeached evan mecham rescinded that order

in one of his first acts as governor! (goddam!)
rising from a searingly dry tropical airmass,
pulled northward by low-pressure cells moving
eastward across the two-head's wilderness

echoing off the sulphur springs & the san simon

valleys came a venal & corruptible voice calling

out to arizonans with the arrogated authority of

i am that i am: “i guess king did a lot for the

colored people, but i don’t think he deserves a

national holiday.” but the rocks surely cried out

in protest & boycotts. all manner of stones,

pythagorean frozen music, released their song

with stevie wonder singing lead --hapy birthday

to yuh -- public enemy struck back, the nfl

relocated the super bowl & arizonans, kicking &

screaming, capitulated in ’92 (goddam!)
where even the wind that competes at dusk

to be heard with the yips, barks & howls of

coyotes in telltale yellow desert coats, weeps &

wails in uncertain english even tho’ placed for

a year in english immersion classes where

languages other than english were banned from

speech. brainfried arizonans insist that the

speech of the alligator juniper, the bitter condalia

& crucifixion thorn, the catclaw & even the skunk

bush had better be the same as that which arose in

england & southeastern scotland; that they

obsequiously subordinate their mother tongues,

their identity & culture, for to speak a language

other than english is nothing more than a social

defect.(goddam!)
behold arizonans, the behemoth that u have made,
rising out of the desert, so mean, & abrupt of
emotion – & so unlike that mighty torch-bearing
mother of exiles on a distant shore who verily
welcomed the poor & the homeless. this shire reeve
golem of single eye & foul disposition casts his
all-seeing search light glance to expose & extirpate
all illegals wherever they might be found, especially
in the ghostly golden gate barrio, in cuatro milpas,
or in any of the barrios historicas that housed the
brown laborers who built yr streets & towns, yr

canals, laid tracks for trolleys & trains that brought

in the droves of undocumented anglos who

overwhelmed the indigenous population! (goddam!)
what have u done, arizonans? the adam of yr labors
has run amok & points proudly back to the womb

from whence it came – that monster matrix of

racism, red-baiting,anti-government sentiment &

resentment of anything progressive, whose birth

juices reek of hatred & calumny – back to u & yr

guiltfear, yr paroxysmally parochial thinking. it has

engorged on a steady diet of rights violations, english-

only legislation, reasonable suspicion & belief, & now

it stalks like a grotesquery seeking to devour the
interdisciplinary study of racialized peoples, latinos
& chicanos in particular. what makes u think, brain-
fried arizonans, that it won’t turn on & devour u?

©Joseph McNair;2010

most interesting of our american birds (16)

most interesting of our american birds

the gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the
gulf coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a
toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife...
government officials & independent
scientists

most interesting of our american birds
whose iconic flight & voracious appetite
inspired no less than audubon to inscribe
rhapsodically in his journals:

listen to the sound of the splash they make
as they drive their open bills, like a pock-net,
into the sea…

a pelican feeding its young embossed on
louisiana’s state seal by 1804 & on her blue
unfurling flag by 1912, a fitting perch for one
who’d tear her own flesh to feed her young.

one of ornithology’s most astonishing events,
in 1966, the year it became louisiana’s state
bird, pelecanus fuscus vanished like the hero
in a novel from the state’s entire coast.

did concurrent tropical storms savage vulnerable
nests in its overwash? perhaps some pathogen
or virulent human encroachment struck? or
more likely the toxic pesticides from

agricultural plains, drained into the mighty
mississip, got absorbed by anchovies &
other favored fish -- did an inside job on
eggshell formation, on eggshell thickness,

& caused the heroic pelican – the same who
would destroy itself to feed its young -- to
destroy its eggs as it sat on them within its
nest to incubate & protect them.

thus did the brown pelican become like a
novel’s anti-hero whose one abiding trait
is bewildered & anxious uncertainty about the
futility & fundamental amorality of life.

for despite efforts to transplant fledglings from
florida’s peninsula, at hundreds per year, or
banning ddt, the pelican will never see any
pattern in life & rarely its destination.

we can see this now in the frightened eyes of
oil-soaked birds who hobble like drunks at dawn’s
break on barataria bay because they cannot fly;
whose brown & white feathers, are now jet black.

whose nests & new hatchlings are coated with
crude, whose gunk-glazed eggs, like their habitats,
may never be cleaned or saved, whose offensive
images are the new expletives for corporate greed

& signs of our failure to live in harmony with nature,
symbols of our disdain for ecological balance,
signifiers of our suicidal self-absorption --
new metaphors for our insanity.



© Joseph McNair;2010

stormy weather (15)

stormy weather

for lena horne

(1917 - 2010)

tube captured, tube enthralled -- cut off from
smell, touch, taste, heat-sense & gravity. only
my eyes & ears worked, held at electron gun

point by florescent vision – those long shapely
brown legs (with the eagles on her stockings
that flew in formation up under her hemline,

still flock in jagged colored specs & fly in
semicircular orbits around the edges of my eyes)
fill my memory now like they filled that large,

deep & heavy evacuated glass envelope so many
days of my youth ago when that heart shaped,
luminous face (that no gal made could get the

shade), those large, bold beautiful eyes paired
with that elusive smile made their impressions,
made me consider my first faustian exchange --

my soul for just a few moments, maybe just one
night. i was, afterall, 12, star-struck & heavily
hormonal. if made to choose between lena as

sweet georgia brown, god or petunia jackson,
georgia (miss brown to u!) would win every
damn time. i was no inverterate gambler then &

my real addictions were years ahead, but I felt
like a drunk heady in his very first cups. the
pleasure possibilities waxed infinite. the very

thought of her & me – a real little joe – made
a fantastical cabin in the sky seem quite absurdly
possible, even desirable. & then i heard her sing.

another night, another movie, same television...
framed against an open window adorned with
formal treatments -- swags, jabots & pleated

drapes -- that could have been several of the
imaginable colors in the middle gradient shades
of gray, between absolute black & white, looking

out on an urban evening street scene which
captured a couple scurrying to get out of the
rain & prefaced by introductory strains from the

cab calloway orchestra with a cameo of the immaculate
cab himself animatedly conducting that special
group of musicians who needed little in the way

of conducting. she sang a sultry soprano lament
(an offstage wind machine ruffling the sheer full-
length sleeves of her perfect black & sequined

dress). her perfect phrasing evoked a swarm of
associations caught up in a vertically oriented
rotating column of emotion & she sang her

heart thru the vortex, making the raging storm
a distinctive collocate of the literal; a subtle way of
grasping one kind of thing in terms of another,

fixing its elemental turbulence & power as the
central & controlling image of her lifesong:

don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky,
stormy weather, since my man & i ain't together
seems like its raining all the time

i felt the stirrings of love in that moment, for
lena & for language, for she embodied every
feature of a poem in motion draped in a

musical score. she had a way of spreading her
arms when she sang that had no paraphrase,
but just as clearly said “love me” & when

she left that open window walking down
stairs that split the orchestra into two sections
with the camera panning from full room to

a head to hip shot to climbing up her bodice
resolving in a full body shot framing her in
a spotlight on a night club floor & in my

poetic heart, she became for me more than
a beautiful, evocative ornament, but an enduring
metaphor for the complexities of love.

© Joseph McNair; 2010

awaiting an appropriate provocation (14)

awaiting an appropriate provocation

tell me, arizonans, is a god or perhaps
some human demiurge supposedly
the author of your laws?

surely a god, for who else might godly
see thru’ layers of artifice & deception,
in honest toil, toned down actions & attire,
minimal human intercourse, capricious
movement, desperate concealment, the
furtive, undocumented heart?

whose nostrils can indeed detect the
stench of flight from custody or country;
the reeking infectious foreignness of
interlopers, who abide among us
fangfeeding off the fat of the land,
diminishing us all.

tell me, arizonans, are there among u,
like minos, those who commune with an
olympian sire? inspired to make laws

that bestow clairvoyance on lawmen,
enable them to clair-see “probable &
reasonable causes” in mexicans or
o.t.m.s who work the bean fields or
sinister sit on porches, in the back
of pickup trucks, in barrios & in

cantinas of historic ethnic enclaves or
those who don’t; who speak subversive
spanish, pantomime the tortilla & butter
truth about speedy gonzales, the frito
bandito, las posadas & la llorona or
any other appropriate provocation

for trivializing the human spirit --
por una noche de cristal fea,
arizona style.

©Joseph McNair; 2010

for wayne shorter (13)

for wayne shorter

(1933 -- )

perhaps the music’s greatest living
composer, yr organic conceptions
of fissioning melody, harmony,
& rhythm took the state of play in a
fresh direction. one of the few young
composers who could take a piece
to miles & get it back unchanged;
get the band to play it like u wrote
it, conforming precisely to its often
bopish, sometimes modal structure,
swiveling where it said to swivel,
snaking where it said to snake,
crossing over the tonic center from
the consonant right or weaving back

over the new middle from the
dissonant left in densely dreaded
unison plaits that changed the sound
of jazz, that changed fluidly, like yr
own rollins-like tenor style, with its
ripping, runaway trane asymmetries
to the coruscating color of yr rhythmic,
interval leaping soprano solo voice
chanting its own mystical name &
transfiguring signature, its new motifs
& alternate insights assigned to
randomness, new denouements &
meticulous untyings of personal meaning –
rushing in where boppers fear to tread!

© Joseph McNair; 2010

for hubert laws (12)

for hubert laws
(1939 -- )

from the start, when it was the instrument of the wood-god pan,
the flute has been associated with pure (some might say impure)
energy. its sound releases something naturally untamed..."
--seamus heaney

the iconic miss mary’s place,
a hoary houston honky tonk
prominently placed because
it pinpoints a precise location
for yr musical roots, soul sourced
in an urban manifestation &
a perceptible revelation of the
jook, ribald cake & whiskey
cousin to the beans & bacon
blues with a stepped up tempo
that sulky soaked the late night
& early morning air across the
street from yr house, combined
with yr mama’s gospel piano
& yr daddy’s harmonica riffs,
the basis of yr own funky, secular
testimony, the crucible where
rhythm & blues, classical julliard,
& the spiritual, weighed & mixed
in proper amounts, given time to
season, fluxed down, solve et
coagula, & transmuted into the
sweetest, purest melodic &
multicolored jazz flute tone
ever proffered, ever played.

© Joseph McNair; 2010

for bennie carter (11)

for bennie carter
(1907 -2003)

the only musician to have recorded in eight
different decades, yr life, a symphony in riffs
pouring out of yr trumpet, out of yr alto, out
yr head & captured on vinyl, on tape, on compact
disc living & playing thru’ yr legend making,
writing it in the tales yr music told. yr rites of
passage & the sheparding process where those at a
higher level of understanding guided u to
& thru’ a greater exposure to the music. rex
stewart, sidney bechet, fatha hines, fats waller,
willie the lion smith, james p. johnson & the duke
transferred their powers to u, caused a change in yr
existential condition; freed u from profane time.

freed u to recapitulate the history of
the music that thru this recapitulation u
might sanctify the music anew, reveal its deep
meanings to the new generations, help them own &
assume the responsibility of mystical
vocation. u took time to befriend & mentor miles
when he had no friends; to mentor q when like u, he
wanted to write scores for film, to be there for j.j.
johnson, art pepper & max roach as they each increased
in stature & in favor. & u also took time
to teach yr alto to sing. yr signature sound was
smooth as silk, flowing like a lazy river that might
race like a rapid or be still like a honeyed pool.

© Joseph McNair; 2010