glasper casts an agile shadow : : left hand step to right hand float : : runagate pace, pace the forgetful : : left hand do what right hand do : : playing the changes a century don’t make : : left hand shade while right hand color : : pulls the 90s up at the roots : : left hand cradle the right hand blue-bop : : transplants the tuber into tyner’s soil : : left hand respond to right hand call : : hip hop head all locks and keys : : left hand swing and right hand scatter : : timely, composed in shifty signatures : : left hand throw what right hand blueing : : glasper’s a hobo riding the rail : : left hand steal away right hand home

From a half-red sea.

disciple

my father: younger, handsome, downright square,
eyes like brown buttons fastening his face
over his soul, mouth not too straight to swear,
to say, man, sonny stitt’s ass trashed the place,

hymning his saxophonist small-g god,
enlisted arms push-up strong, lips curled less
and less around cigarettes (in an odd
reversal of what the army did best:

march men to foul habits) and more around
his mouthpiece, in search of pure embouchure:
not square: hell-bent on welling a full sound
from his horn: a liquid literature

with biblical phrasing, an interlude
of stimulants unchemical to blood.