I heard the timbre, not the grammar,
the words and phrases flying by,
the textures and the sheer momentum,

the sounds just gone, the ones to come.
I could not follow it at first
but, some years on, I saw the pattern.

A sentence had become a sentence.
And so I learned the heroes too.
They spoke of everything and nothing,

the pleasures of the evanescent,
a language full of saxophones,
no dictionaries allowed.