by Barry Wallenstein

What the artist tastes early on
or late in the chapters
shows up on the pallet:
a thin sound or a fat sound;
the people show up or they stay home.

What the good man tries
sometimes flies and sometimes
it’s all echo;
a lucky reporter rests on the deck
while the neighborhood suffers a white proximity.

Lester played for Lady Day
and for Stan, Gilberto sang
a samba--made the charts
and Pres, behind Billy, would have wept
had other worries not closed his eyes.

Lester Young, Lady's Pres,
has long been gone and enshrined
in moneyless glorymaybe while
S. Getz, a worthy ghost too, a new comer,
sits in with the older shades—in and out of time.