During the year 1957, I experienced a spiritual awakening writing “I experienced, by the Grace of God, a spiritual awakening [and] in gratitude I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music… This album is a humble offering to Him.
–John Coltrane, original liner Notes to A Love Supreme
Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken.
– Isaiah 54:10
I ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
There are always signs here–the owl camouflaged in the trees,
the sentinel bird who warns the others, or the scotch butterfly
who stops flying if a cloud drifts in front of the sun.
It takes
some kind of love to watch, to listen to the joy of what
Coltrane felt as a higher power that emerges from his saxophone
over the wash of cymbal and piano,
or the way the grasses
and saplings emerge out of this ground fog.
This path
was called, ages ago, the way.
But now, how often
it seems that our love is like a momentary subatomic particle
leaving its track on a laboratory film.
Still, everything testifies
to something beyond itself, as each cliff becomes a precipice or
a vista, each step a promise or a warning, a kind of spiritual
love beyond the music’s range.
Which is why love is sometimes
a lone skiff caught in a storm at sea.
The prophet Elisha called for
a musician to inspire a love of truth.
Coltrane called the love
he found the Supreme Truth, and its sound a prayer like a mantra.
He must have felt like Jeremiah, whose word, his music, burst
suddenly from his heart become like a burning fire.
Like the woman at the well who suddenly understood there is
a water beyond the water she had been drawing for so long.
A love supreme, just those four syllables repeated in different modes
and chants.
Sheets of sound like solar winds drifting us towards
and ending that never ends,
a mountain stream with no beginning.
Just four repeated syllables, a love supreme, opening our horizons
with each variation.
Repeat and replicate is what science calls it.
A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.
Here, it is
A leaf fall, a leaf fall, a leaf fall, like a curtain of prayer,
like each
moonrise path this morning signaling an end to the soul’s long
drought.
Someone asked the poet, Jack Gilbert, why he repeated
the word moon so much — it’s the window of the soul, he replied.
II RESOLUTION
It was Dickinson who said she felt like she was living in a circle
without a center.
Or Like trying to take a close up photo
of the horizon (Stephen Wright).
Or the way that soaring hawk
searches between heaven and earth.
Sometimes our frantic search
feels like the band’s chaotic movement to harmony.
Here the deer
make a hardly visible path through a thicket of bramble.
Words, sounds,
speech, memory, fears and emotions (Coltrane).
Each word creates
a track the other words, the other notes, follow.
Each path the band
takes is always a path and not a destination.
We are all foreigners
and exiles, wrote Peter,
which is why the struggle, why the lightning
runs against a wilderness of doubting words and notes that never
get played.
To play beyond the self is to stand alone against
so much hate and disbelief.
It must have seemed that way for
Jonathan, speaking truth to power to his father the king who
he loved,
for isn’t every love a kind of bass line countering shards
doubt?
As it must have seemed Saul’s love was made of broken
fragments from another life.
He could not stop hunting
for David, hoping to find him at spear’s end.
How easily hate
multiplies like a virus,
like so many moths eating at the edges
of the soul.
Despair means to divide, to pair off, to lose one’ self.
It’s the music that resolves us, as Elisha knew, as Coltrane played
universal love,
as each member of the band gifted their own
unique spirit.
And isn’t love always a word looking for someone
to repeat it in prayer?
And didn’t every word begin as a prayer?
The hawk now on a branch waits for me to make the wrong decision.
Each has a memory we need to hold in the secret rooms of the heart
the way Jonathan’s love for David held together in life and in death.
They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.”
III PURSUANCE
When the drum solo begins and Coltrane breaks in it is as if
the robins, wrens, and jays repeated their own supreme love
or the way
north of here, the Sandhill Cranes settle by the river,
each with its own vision of the world
then take flight seeming
to open holes in an unbelieving air.
Further on, the far bridge
seems to hover over the water as if it too might take flight,
Fata Morgana, science calls it.
Everyone fights their own illusions.
The worm circling my bird feeder thought it is crawling in a straight line.
If you look carefully you can see the faint deer trails branching off
from the main paths,
how the slopes facing the wind are more worn,
how it is through a love of the created world that we learn to love
each other as John says.
There are acts of tenderness and love like
my boyhood friend who took, so gently, a sleeping bird from his pocket.
Or my daughter feeding the rabbit cowering under the zebra grass.
And tonight the planets are preparing to line up in a procession
towards the far horizon,
while an owl sews a path between the trees,
towards a future that is also a gathering of each past flight,
while a drum solo trails off as if trying to retrace it own beginnings,
as one memory falls in love with another,
as I remember those
two elephants, once captured and separated, who met again
in the Tennessee Sanctuary just north of here years later,
and embraced trunks in an act of love beyond our words for it.
IV PSALM
The woodpecker’s tapping is not always a code we need
to decipher.
The call of the jay just out of sight is not
always an invitation to follow.
No one needs to read the clouds,
the wind doesn’t always bring news.
Each note Coltrane plays here
is a word from his poem,
the universe has many wonders,
none can compare, all roads return to Him, fears and weakness,
which include our own stories,
as once, in some other woods,
a Black Bear stood up across a gulley, his posture, I thought,
a threat, or a kind of longing.
Later, a fox stopped to stare
before trotting off into the underbrush, offering, I believed,
a moment of recognition.
Everything we see is a foothold
towards the next thing we see, what Kierkegaard called faith.
One thought can produce millions of vibrations and they all
go back to God, wrote Coltrane.
You can hear him whisper
Thank you, thank you God beneath the track here.
I found, once,
a small altar of carefully set stones, a cairn, far off the trail,
and beside it, some sacred pictures, and the painted word,
GRATITUDE.
It was the year my young friend died of cancer.
There was no name, no story except the story I imagined as
my own.
And yet how often we seem strangers in a strange land,
looking for ourselves,
for stories etched on catacomb walls,
only
to be called back to the quiet waters of the soul.
Day to day
pours forth speech, wrote the Psalmist, pours forth music,
pours forth love, Coltrane would say,
pours forth gratitude,
and now, remembering that word, expressing my own supreme love,
I write, in what Coltrane called a universe of many wonders,
this
benediction, this modal psalm, in love, in faith, and in gratitude.
Richard Jackson is the author of 18 books of poetry including Footprints, The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, as well as 4 chapbooks, and 12 books of prose. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA. NEH Fellowships the Slovene order of Freedom for his literary and humanitarian work during the Yugoslav wars.
