Today's poem is by JD Debris

[first tango]
       

The man in the dusk-colored glasses
haunts my neighborhood with his sax.

On a street corner better described
as an absence, he harmonizes

with the car alarms & howling strays.
Throw a dollar in his open case

& watch it fall forever, as if through
a night sodden with every other blue-

black night that was, or might have been.
They say before the cars & even

before the feral dogs & avenues,
before any of the above was imaginable,

he'd make a ram's horn cry, coax a low
whistle from the brittle throat of a crow.

They say, when it was just the night & him,
he taught the night what lonely meant.

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Copyright © 2023 JD Debris All rights reserved
from Salt Hill
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission