EUPHONIC SOUNDS

"What's scurrilously called ragtime's
an invention here to stay."
--Scott Joplin

--Sedalia, MO, 1899--

In the gas chandeliers' sway,
tobacco smoke swirls and syncopated chords
from an upright piano, Joplin
presides over drunken cakewalking,
buck and wing steppers who heed the call
of his latest rag, a tune part song,
part breath. In the July heat of this night,
this century turning Joplin's rag
celebrates a new signature.
The piano almost a march, the blues played
in some lover's embrace, a losing hand.
The blues into the fourth chorus,
says: O this suffering, these weary bones--
as the piano grabs hold of the body,
tells everything that will happen to it:
I still love you, you hurt me.
This same exhaustion of ravers, break-dancers
under a neon kaleidoscope in a haze
where what they touch pulsates,
where a rapper in baggy pants and jacket
spins out tales of bravado, want--
the rhymes' power, his words'
staccato becomes our own catharsis.
The blues in the bloodstream,
as it was for Joplin once at the Maple Leaf,
caught up in a late-night jubilee--
the hunger's hard work consuming us:
O Forgive me, please love, Hold me.
That refrain, until there's no way
for our body not to surrender.
Prairie breezes from an open window singing
the rag, its blessed cool relief,
as Joplin resolves the tune's dissonance
in sweet measures, riffs, the dancers
falling only to rise astounded, to shake
these blues loose. Our abandon
downright scandalous.