11 October 2021
The web resembles an octopus, torn linen nested between beam and roof line. The hole at the top would be mouth, a flap at the bottom’s a flag fluttering in air (the breeze moves higher up in the `ohi`a). Screen of bird song, bass notes banging where I can’t see man or hammer. The difference between being one’s vocation and being: Herbie Hancock. “It sounds like a liver thing,” our tenant’s girlfriend says on the phone. I hear a brush move through hair. When Herbie ruined the show by playing the wrong chord, Miles carried on as if it were right. The Buddha Lilith and I visit is covered by vegetation; on his head a moss crew cut; in the ears, lichen; on the face a beard of green. Buddha also fades into forest, facing in from the road behind a fern screen. Historical smeared over geological time like vegemite. Miles’s voice was always over-heard. “Don’t play the butter notes,” he advised, in which “butter” meant “fat” or “obvious.” So Herbie played all the notes but those he usually rested on. Improvisation avoids whatever completes a phrase. She left, talking about jobs and an RV in California. Now a saw cuts bird song into slices, like bread. Morning gathers itself in time without asking any favors. Offers improvisation, and morning takes it up like a synthesizer or a dog tangled on her leash, bark raspy as Miles’s voice. Hers is not a call for help, exactly, but a comment on the failures of geometry. Her diagram of complaints was a dense squiggle of lines that appeared twice in her book. In the other book, book speaks, as does the boy inside the book. A twice told tale goes on a fugue. When asked what she remembered of her goal in overtime, my daughter said she remembered nothing. Her teammate’s dad watched it 40 times.
--details from Herbie Hancock's 2014 Norton Lectures on Poetry at Harvard
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