Inside a nightclub the barfly cries
While crowds crouch over sidecars
While inside a funeral of scotch mist dies
And outside rain obscuring glass on
midnight cars
Last call for highball headlines and no
nostalgic wars
Outside rain swirls around the gravel and grist
As inside crowds crouch under fluorescent stars
And inside they slug down scotch mist
with a twist
Last call cocktail tears and no more heroin crime
While outside rain is making slides and grunge
Just as a nightclub barfly sighs the lush life line
“Lady Day was a blue sponge”
With the heat hounding her on her death bed
to rollover on her connection
She scores another win in one last Downbeat
magazine jazz poll election
Buffalo, New York {2003}
From: Crosswalk Casserole
Summary
“BLUES BOUTS-RIMES TO BILLIE HOLIDAY” by Michael C. Ford is a poem centered on love and relationships, music, mortality and loss. The poem develops its subject through recurring images and shifts in emotional pressure rather than reducing the experience to a single statement.
Analysis
Voice
The speaker works through observation and associative imagery, allowing scene and image to carry the argument.
Style and form
The poem is musically inflected, line-driven. The poem moves by accumulation: images, references, and tonal turns build on one another, so meaning emerges from their relationships as much as from narrative sequence.
Themes and imagery
Its strongest thematic currents include love and relationships, music, mortality and loss, nature. Concrete images give those abstractions physical weight, while changes in diction and pace keep the poem from settling into a single emotional register.
Reading the poem
A productive way to read “BLUES BOUTS-RIMES TO BILLIE HOLIDAY” is to watch how its images change function as the poem progresses. Details that initially establish scene or memory become emotional evidence. The result is a poem whose argument is carried through association, rhythm, and image as much as through explicit statement.
Explore this poem
Source & rights
Source: Crosswalk Casserole (Lawn Gnome Publishing, First Edition, 2013)
Rights: © 2013 Lawn Gnome Publishing. All rights reserved.