What is it like
to make music?
It is skipping
on sunlight
opening your heart
to something strange
unexpected
something sublimely beautiful
in those sublimely beautiful times.

Sometimes it's a bust.
Sometimes a thousand degrees
of sweetness.

But when the music
plays through you
when you are not much more
than a spectator
to sounds emanating
mysteriously
from your lips
your lungs
your fingers

It's crazy good then.

There truly are no words
to express the miracle
of music in the moment
the player
listening as raptly
as the audience

It all comes together
at the end
and that's the lesson jazz has taught me.

It will all come together
at the end
in glory
or in sorrow
or both.

Most likely both.

he eschewed the label,
“Native American,” for he was *****,
and he wasn't ashamed he liked his spirits
dollar wine worked as well

cirrhosis was a family trait
though he didn't learn the word until an army doc
admonished him, saying he would earn the curse
by 45, if he kept it up

and he did, even more after that crazy
Asian war, where he killed a half dozen men
they called yellow, though to Walter, they looked
to be his emaciated brown cousins

he could stand tall, straight
with a pint of rot gut in him, burning
his belly, but not causing his head to spin
though it helped him block them out:

those he did not know; those he
slaughtered like lambs with the gun they issued him;
those who inhabited a space just behind his eyes
whenever they closed, night or day

someone found him, in his pickup bed
dead from exposure, from too many years
on the bottle, too many dreams he tried to drown
and too many ghosts to haunt his nights

Gallup, New Mexico, 1999

When the heart stirs
the feet soon follow
or so it is with me
born to be a dancer

Lithe and compact
fearless in motion
a Baryshnikov of the living room
a Nureyev in the night

When my daughter
was new born
seventeen sweet years ago
I would hold her close
dance her through the whole house
sing to her
tell her
I'll love you forever and ever
no matter what
promise her everything
it was in my power to give

Here
in my dotage
my dancing embarrasses her
my rude manners
outrage her at times
No matter

I thrill when
I hear her sing
weep
when I see her onstage
grin like God's fool
when I meet her at
the backstage door.

This tribute
and these poor lines
are humbly offered
by a man who is blessed
a man who wakes up every day
saying thanks
a father proud
a retired musician
(more or less)
whose child
without urging
took up the mantle
and carried it further
than dad ever could.