Chet Baker, Amsterdam, 1988
A single spot slides the trumpet’s flare then stops
at that face, the extraordinary ruins thumb-marked
with the hollows of heroin, the rest chiaroscuroed.
Amsterdam, the final gig, canals & countless
stone bridges arc, glimmered in lamps. Later this week
his Badlands face, handsome in a print from thirty
years ago, will follow me from the obituary page
insistent as windblown papers by the black cathedral
of St. Nicholas standing closed today: pigeon shit
& feathers, posters swathing tarnished doors, a litter
of syringes. Junkies cloud the gutted railway station blocks
& dealers from doorways call coca, heroina, some throaty
foaming harmony. A measured inhalation, again
the sweet embouchure, metallic, wet stem. Ghostly,
the horn’s improvisations purl & murmur
the narrow strasses of Rosse Buurt, the district rife
with purse-snatchers, women alluring, desolate, poised
in blue windows, Michelangelo boys, hair spilling
fluent running chords, mares’ tails in the sky green
& violet. So easy to get lost, these cavernous
brown cafés. Amsterdam, & its spectral fogs, its
bars & softly shifting tugboats. He builds once more
the dense harmonic structure, the gabled houses.
Let’s get lost. Why court the brink & then step back?
After surviving, what arrives? So what’s the point
when there are so many women, creamy callas with single
furled petals turning in & upon themselves
like variation, nights when the horn’s coming
genius riffs, metal & spit, that rich consuming rush
of good dope, a brief languor burnishing
the groin, better than any sex. Fuck Death.
In the audience, there’s always this gaunt man, cigarette
in hand, black Maserati at the curb, waiting,
the fast ride through mountain passes, descending with
no rails between asphalt & precipice. Inside, magnetic
whispering take me there, take me. April, the lindens
& horse chestnuts flowering, cold white blossoms
on the canal. He’s lost as he hears those inner voicings,
a slurred veneer of chords, molten, fingering
articulate. His glance below Dutch headlines, the fall
"accidental" from a hotel sill. Too loaded. What do you do
at the brink? Stepping back in time, I can only
imagine the last hit, lilies insinuating themselves
up your arms, leaves around your face, one hand vanishing
sabled to shadow. The newsprint photo & I’m trying
to recall names, songs, the sinuous figures, but facts
don’t matter, what counts is out of pained dissonance,
the sick vivid green of backstage bathrooms, out of
broken rhythms—and I’ve never forgotten, never—
this is the tied-off vein, this is 3 a.m. terror
thrumming, this is the carnation of blood clouding
the syringe, you shaped summer rains across the quays
of Paris, flame suffusing jade against a girl’s
dark ear. From the trumpet, pawned, redeemed, pawned again
you formed one wrenching blue arrangement, a phrase endlessly
complicated as that twilit dive through smoke, applause,
the pale hunted rooms. Cold chestnuts flowering April
& you’re falling from heaven in a shower of eighth notes
to the cobbled street below & foaming dappled horses
plunge beneath the still green waters of the Grand Canal.
Copyright © 2006 by Lynda Hull. Reprinted from Star Ledger with the permission of the University of Iowa Press.