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ART TATUM : The Man I Love

Man is man's own oblast. A good blaze now :

Our feather wrinkles on the tine.

Art's hand bent in its own image.

Who knows what sloppy hearts pale

Beyond the lightschirm in the auditorium?

Particles glance at the threshold,

The whole is bathed in sparks, and nothing,

Oh, nothing more is given off.

He is a fine figurer, casts arpeggi between

Open chords, as to show their composition.

At the back of the universe,

In a darkening well of fluent gas and stars,

There may be the body

And the thought and the eye and hand

Of a man loved, a figure loved, of a name

Spoken softly. Of an understanding given

And of a brusque action,

Beyond which no word moved.

We pass back into our years, watching often

As night falls, particular

In our observation, carrying up a limb here,

A notion there, into the doorway over us :

A doorway through which—

Watching, listening—we then carefully step.