for Win Pe

While the quivering blue note of dusk
lasts, we lie in our rooms, bound
by a common kitchen, where we sat whole days
and nights, going through Marlboro packs, the history of art
and our lives, the length of a cigarette travelling
countries, galleries, even the roads ahead.

And you sing, your voice mournful
for the first time; the phone will ring
when the dark comes
to take its place between us, the call for you
to pack and take the road to LA.

You sing the foreign songs made native
in your heart. The words you don't understand
but their sounds are familiar as the signs
on the paths of your life, the road to Mandalay,
the mountain ways of Shan, the route from Pagan
to Rangoon, the lives you may not see again.
Soon the whole world is with us, the Hebrew,
the Persian, Hindi and Serbian songs
linking hands with the turnchyyin of your home.

In the dark I drift on your tunes, your voice
traversing the mournful range of loss, at home
in the music, reminding I am not at home anywhere,
I will lose your songs down the road. So long
we improvised ensemble, made new measures to fill
these Iowan days, so long I played Boswell
to your Johnson, so long we drummed the table
to Glen Miller, or went all the way
with Sinatra through the night, now I falter
and the band goes dumb. Without your lead
nothing swings, no stairways to the stars.

When you say it is time, I excuse myself
for a walk and take a path we never tried,
to field of prairie grass, and notice for the first time
the stars of a Midwestern sky, their plaintive
phrasings, like the foreign songs on your tongue, saying
what we already know, what our local words
will never know. The river holds
their notes, as if it understands.
Then I walk back to your voice, to the right chord
to conclude our sessions with, knowing
I must go on improvising, and arrange
the simple melodies we made, find
new instruments, new words
to carry our songs
for soloing ahead.