Pergolesi/Mayfield - "Live!"
by Charles Leggett
—Magnificat;
assemblage of high school choirs
and
orchestras, Lodi, CA, late 1970’s
—“Medley:
My Bottle is my Companion / The
Highway
is Like a Woman”;
recorded April 4,
1983
at Uncle Charlie’s in Corte Madera, CA;
released
by Winner in 1992
Sitting on my stool straining
to dance with a rented string
bass at eight o’clock
on a Wednesday in a church;
Percy plunks four keys—three octaves—
and laughs, a hoarse chuckle.
Fondles and dips
into molasses.
Now this
faced into the orchestra
far stage right, so
the two hundred fifty
seventeen year-olds—
is blues, he
croons; tangles
to a seventh, and the chest
caves in as his
boys
slide into the mud.
all those voices
hollering and cooing in
the nubile holiday—
are to my left.
His boys
move slow but sound
impatient: the brushes,
thwack;
the stand-up, bony;
the hollow-body, soaked
in
a mild Lethe of reverb;
the keyboards, a helpless narration.
Our conductor is bald,
my calluses have burst
and people cough,
but how the faces glow.
Charles Leggett is a
professional actor based in Seattle, WA.
Recent publications include
Bottle Rockets and The
Centrifugal Eye.
Others include The
Lyric, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry
and 2012
Pushcart nominations by Kansas City Voices and The
Golden Sparrow Literary Review;
work is forthcoming in Big Pulp,
Constellations and
Graze Magazine.
His long poem “Premature
Tombeau
for John Ashbery” was an e-chapbook in the Barnwood Press “Great Find” series.