THE ARGONNE HOTEL PRESS CHAPBOOK SERIES

PANTHER PASSING ACROSS
Poems by R.D. BAKER

The Creationists • Future Tense • Saxophone Dreams • Making Up • Summer Vacation in Yoknapatawpha County • Double Helix, Double Bind • For Example— • Pathology • Territory • Panther Passing Across • and more

$7.00 US • 40 pages

Copyright © 1995, 1999 The Argonne Hotel Press. ISBN 1-88761-03-3
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The Creationists

Our parents, like gods,
created us for their own purposes.

We exist to fulfill their plans—
from a sense of duty, or conformity,
or as insurance against their loneliness.

Our parents gave us life, perhaps,
simply for their own amusement:
because it pleased them to feel like gods.

They endowed us with their dreams
of immortality, their nightmares
of nonexistance; or more pragmatically,
devised us to support them in their feeble dotage.

Our parents created us sometimes
out of simple carelessness,
ignorant and unthinking bravery,
or the unknowing and unforgiving
urgency of their bodies.

They wanted us to complete their lives,
to make them laugh out loud,
fill their hearts with swelling, bloody pride—

or to seal a covenant with nature,
which they call destiny,
and personify as God.

Saxophone Dreams

‘‘Music is ‘Yes–yes...yes–no...no–yes.’ ’’
—Charlie Parker
I had that dream again, you know the one,
the one everybody has who ever heard Bird
or Coltrane blow the blues through jazz:

I’m on the stage, the light so bright,
my shades so dark, the night so right,
the crowd so righteous, gold sax held tight.

Mouth softly kisses throbbing reeds, fluttering
heartbeat keeps time with a musical rhyme
so sweet, so sharp, so clear

the horn hurts so good the ear to hear,
making love supreme to space and time,
my sax like a woman who won’t be denied

her pleasure. Measure for measure, hot jazz
moves the crowd, pumps pressure of blood
through miles of smiles, white teeth grinning,

fingers clicking, snapping out the jagged rhythms,
soaring sounds smash aural prisons,
scatter multicolored visions, then,

layin’ down the musical facts, one voice,
Charlie’s voice, crawls out of the crowd and cracks:
‘‘He’s coooool, that white boy on the sax!’’