Color Theory, San Angelo
BY T. J. MCLEMORE
Finalist for the 2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program
Previously appeared in Crazyhorse
Morning dark. Tin sheds rattle in the highway
blow-by. The oilfield boys turn in their beds,
gathering up the sheets. New bars open here almost
every week, spraypainted signs hung with twine
from the awnings of the mortar-clogged
redbrick storefronts. As the sun climbs, the wind
picks up, snatching dust from under mesquites,
the eastern sky like a red house reflected
in a still lake, twin buttes dwindling to purple
on the west road out of town. Midmorning
stiffens in the heat. Coffeeshops on the stretch fill
with familiars and the old words sell, rain, dust
mingle with new ones—frack, quake, EQ—
as oldtimers flip through the shop’s photobooks
and rub their dry knuckles into the afternoon,
nodding and waking to find yellow-headed
blackbirds at the feeder, another novelty
to make things spin. The stretch goes still
waiting for the bars to open. Blue sky,
blue sky. Not a prayer for rain, yet
golden hour lights a host of green—
deep taproots find the river they seek.
The reservoir carried off by many mouths,
a dry year, white rings on the cringing blue.
Standards Trio, Casa di Dante
BY T. J. MCLEMORE
Finalist for the 2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program
The first thing I hear
as I take my seat near the back
is that Dante never lived here.
But Beatrice’s body is buried
in the parish church around
the corner. When she died
he fetishized her ghost, arming
our hearts, perhaps, forever
to do war against the world.
I imagine him rolling out
a thin mattress each night
in this long wing of the house
where abstract paintings hang
down the whitewashed walls.
The canvases unspool in red,
seraphic, each figure like a knot
of string or a decaying rose
or blood blooming in water.
Dozens of us squeeze
into his narrow room, filling
rows of folding chairs,
sitting on the side of the stage.
At the back window tourists
watch from the street, grasping
at the window’s black metal
bars as the band begins
their set. The double bass
clacks down its walk, the piano
echoes off the low timbers
of the roof, the kit rattles
under a swirl of brushes,
overfilling this little room.
What would he, that not-quite
medieval genius spinning
his vernacular heaven
in circles, make of this jazz?
All these improvised returns,
the runs always coming
back around on themselves—
almost repeating, but breaking,
veering off—and this music
making itself inside us, each
measure a room, each phrase
a room, interlocking
like well-made rhymes
but escaping fixity like a soul
that leaves and then returns
to the body. Like the tourists
hanging at the bars, we’re
always part in, part out. The trio
plays on. The crowd
outside overflows the piazza.
The rhythms unfurl
inside us, prying us open—
these bodies that (like
the melody) crumble
around us just as we come
to understand them, measure
upon measure, the tangled heart
of the song gathering in us
like a body we imagine inside
its clothes—old scars over
smooth skin, shadow pooling
in a clavicle, the thighs’ double
dive to desire, that first dark,
and from a tiny spark, a flame . . .
The players’ lines fall together
and away, stagger, recover,
now firmness, now sway. Spirit
starts to thread itself into
the world, tired of symmetry
and purity and craving
some swerve, a quick switch
of sound or shadow, the dynamics
of desire, an electric touch
from a stranger’s hand.
Foreign eyes to lose
all language in. A deep well
in the skin’s folds and creases
to plunge into. A safe,
warm room. A form to break
the old constraints
and relieve at last the soul’s
familiar tyranny over the body.
