Jennifer Key
Jennifer Key is currently the Diane Middlebrook
Fellow at the
Jimmy Santiago Baca’s comments:
“The Apprenticeship of
Jelly Roll Morton is a wonderful poem. Original line-endings, interior rhythms
rock, and it defies convention by driving toward the taboo, its narrative is
eccentric and earthen....bravo!”
Jennifer Key
The Apprenticeship of
Jelly Roll Morton
-Romare Bearden
collage of various
papers with ink, graphite, and
surface abrasion on
fiberboard, sight:
24.1 x 34.9 cm (9 ½ x 13 ¾)
No Eden, Storyville.
No green thought in a green glade here,
where sometimes night is a black
palm
sweating at the window and other times,
just a knuckled claw reaching through
this shotgun shack in the Quarter.
Bearden got it right.
The women are only background,
where they bend to retrieve their drawers
and striped stockings where they fell,
and the bottle of hothouse hooch,
Raleigh Rye, sways on the upright.
Out on
shatter like glass and the late moon
old yellow tom, hooks his claw,
but here Jelly Roll swoops and
stomps
a jazz so good it answers its own questions
and makes the live oaks let down
their hair
of heat lightning and Spanish moss.
Each note’s an Amen to the one that came before-
he plays like a preacher working a tent revival
when your soul is simply burning like venom
to be saved. Brother, sister, come to me, Lord,
Lord. The women pull off or on their dresses
depending who’s coming or going
while
that Wurlitzer wails and its keys go on talking
to each other. The way he plays, the way
he plays, those women could almost save themselves.
No Jesus, no deliverance but his-
Not today, they know, when the small of their backs
is a knot of fever and ache and those orchids
tucked in their hair do nothing
but wilt behind one ear-
Still, as long as those hands are walking,
their future’s a reverie
run up the keyboard on one hand.
The way Jelly Roll plays,
it won’t be long until those women-
like Lazarus, conjure women each-
rise and walk the waters off the Gulf.