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.