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.

we didn't
know we wrote
          our names
   into snow,
scrolled
our
         soul into
soil,
our toil invisible
on
         maps but
held
as heavy as
breath
         in cold air,
our love, death
birth, despair
        who we
were written
indelibly
into this
               earth