Conversations About Miles Davis

by John Togher

Tuesday 22nd September 2009 9:29 am

It comes around again, the night,

the promise of chance encounters.

I see her by the end of the bar, alone.

Her face in profile looks like an Italian coastline.

I wander over and begin the dance

between two foreign winds.

We have conversations about Miles Davis,

mutual satisfactions

of each other's thoughts.

We share a love of Polish cinema

and smoke the same brand;

a gentle lean into each other

to light the tip of a cigarette.

With the flush of wine in our cheeks

we leave this dark place

and walk to a park to further this meeting.

She carries twenty strict years 

of catholic prayer

on her slight shoulders,

shoulders that are speckled with the 

scattering madness of jazz,

and I whisper into her ear

that a shoulder without freckles 

is like a sky without stars,

and we kiss, on a bowling green

under moonlight.

Through the night I explore 

the landscape of her body,

the texture of her words,

the secrets of her scent

and we sleep in perfect jigsaw arms,

matching each other's shallow breaths. 

The pure sugar of the morning arrives

and our surroundings sing,

birdsong plays over the low hum of a generator,

punctuated by the flap of new mail,

the tinkle of a milk float.

Then a silence, a falter between heartbeats

and lying on this square patch of green,

unspeaking, an epiphany emerges:

we are the sadness 

in a smudge on a blank page.