Summer 2007
Tina Brooks, Live at Small's Paradise,
April 1958
So, there you are, Tina, blowing bread
at Small’s, reaching right through another Night
in Tunisia. Jimmy Smith, Lou Donaldson,
Eddie McFadden, and—on tubs—the great
Buhaina. And this side side-winds me back
to the snake-filled sound of April 7,
1958, each clinking glass saying
New York is enough, saying, this, the night
before my wife’s birth. Lemon rinds
as a cervical cap? Crushed beaver testicles
as an aphrodisiac? What solitary bread
sifted loose through you like some yeasty star?
Which is what you do, even now as the minnow
holes in your bones breathe a fierce scar
into the carbon you are. You must have known,
Tina, that no man could live long with the name
of a woman, could climb onto stage
with a beaver pelt vibe and, night after night,
build us back to song, quivering through the smoke
of all our restlessness, brandishing
a sax—that public display of your spine.
Tenor man with the soft-toned tongue everyone
dreams to moan, with a voice perfect as mahogany
rice clarifying speech. It speaks in scars.
It says no in more syllables than one, tells me
saying yes might one day be enough. That the secret salt
of the families blows a cool blues in early April heat
even in the warmest seam of a shirt cuff
untucked from your strut. In granules
the pace of your breath gifts us with? This wife
of mine, that saxy lady friend of yours—
both born under an Aries sky, always
like something about to wail itself to song.
How your lemon rind music caps more than
sound, time upon time giving both of us birth.
Which is what you are, even after prison
corralled your softest tongue in loud ingots
of close this, open that. Even after the Horse
galloped through your wrist, bending away
your young. The way an infant resembles
a very old man. Which is what you are
not, Tina, never will be, preserved now
as you are amidst the cool barroom
applause of 1958 before the earth curved
back upon itself, back upon you
and all your compacted breath
as the chrome-slowed discs of your publicly breathing
spine. Something about to live
a very short time tonight at Small’s. This shiver
of paradise, again and again.
George Kalamaras is the author of six books of poetry,
four of which are full-length, Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (Bitter
Oleander Press, forthcoming 2007), Even the Java Sparrows Call Your
Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press,
2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000),
winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series. He is Professor of English
at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
“Tina Brooks, Live at Small’s
Paradise, April 1958,” is a response to an incredible Jimmy Smith
album, which includes the great tenor saxophonist Tina
Brooks (pronounced “Teena”). Harold Floyd (Tina)
Brooks, (1932-1974), had health problems due to drug addiction; his
short and intermittent hospital and prison stays kept him from
recording after 1961.