Amy Lowell Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Doug Holder and Denise Provost
David Gordon is a Boston-based editor of books and journals. His work has appeared in the Vermont Literary Review, Analecta, Aleteia, and Quarto. His poem “Gaudi’s Last Walk” was runner-up for the 2022 Princemere Poetry Prize. His nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications in the USA and Germany, including Newsweek, where he was an award-winning staff writer.
Bill Evans and My Brother’s Hands
Last time I saw our brother in the flesh
And not in dreams or visions where he lingers,
I held his hand, the left one, and I traced
The lines that marked the joints of each his fingers.
I heard him play the piano theme to M*A*S*H
The one he learned by copying Bill Evans.
His hands arpeggiated minor sixths,
Then—kind of blue—E minor with a seventh.
‘Suicide is painless’ the theme claims.
‘Debatable,’ was Evans’ wry reply
As cocaine, smack, and gin swam in his brain
With devastating strokes before he died.
My brother’s hands, though, have not turned to blue
From substances but from a swollen heart.
The melancholy scales that played inside
Got faster, darker as he fell apart.
I spent so many hours watching those
Same hands in churches, bars, and on the stage.
His limber fingers mastered strings and keys
In songs read with his ears, not on a page.
But now his ears and hands lie on a tray
With arms and legs, with torso, head, and heart.
A steel bed for the mortuary’s blaze:
To dust again his instruments of art.
His music, though, will play beyond the fire
And haunt our lives, those secret chords of heaven.
We’ll hear the theme to M*A*S*H and hum along—
So very blue, E minor with a seventh.