Listening to Coltrane’s Alabama as the Perseids Fade Out

Nothing can explain how to love a world 
that sets the heart’s clock always out of synch, 
where the meanings of our words are ambushed 
by the kind of hate that becomes the 16th Street 
Baptist Church bombing, Sept 15, 1963, 
nothing to explain the way Coltrane’s horn 
starts to speak over a trembling bass, tracing 
over the words of King’s eulogy, borrowing 
phrases and cadences until the pressure mounts 
into a collision of dirges as if the music itself 
were trying to speak. 
                                        Nothing to explain how 
when I first read the story in the Eagle-Tribune 
I still believed our dreams meant something that 
we would find out later. Even now the day begins 
to leech into the night the way a few hopeful 
notes seems to hover like doves over the band, 
or the way Anaximander described the world 
as a silent rock floating in space. 
                                                              Now it seems 
Coltrane’s whole quartet has entered the church, 
everyone going everywhere to arrive at the same 
note. I can see a thin line of grief shimmer on 
the ridgeline. Four girls, Addie, Denise, Carole, 
Cynthia, one of them beheaded beneath the rubble. 

The wind tried for hours to rearrange the dust. 
One story followed another like geese until there was 
no story, no trial, no conviction. When Coltrane 
came in over McCoy Tyner’s piano and its slow lament 
he already knew the future was exactly the past. 
The silences and pauses tell a story our words cannot. 
Coltrane didn’t play music, he played the heart. Here, 
even the insects seem to have stopped out of respect. 
There’s a wind that is not even a wind in the trees. 

Anaximander knew our world was a box whose 
sides were endless. Coltrane knew our world was 
the church whose sides collapsed. Alabama— 
all he needed was that one word, rolling down 
the register and trying to lift itself at the end with 
a desperate sigh. 
                                                   I am writing this just north of 
the state of Alabama, the meteors in the darkened sky 
telling the same stories Anaximander heard, or maybe 
the dreams of four girls still wandering off ahead of them 
forever. Now Coltrane, too, seems to cry at the end, and 
if you listen close you’ll swear you hear his voice 
whispering against the stories that set the killers free, 
stories that staggered along the courthouse halls 
until too late. 
                         The music stops and you have to play it 
again just to try to breathe. The first shadows on the lake 
start to blot out the stars. There’s nothing to tell the owl 
who continues to accuse us all, nothing to tell even 
the fish who continue to nibble at the surface of the water 
as if to test, then reject the only world they can see. 

The Perseids go on silently year after year, and tonight
there’s nothing to explain how the soul’s music laments 
its own music, a music now lost in the pure music of grief.