LONG HAIR: Two Jazz Poems Performed by Jefferson Hansen

Composition 409 : Long Hair

    Written in the days following first hearing Anthony Braxton's "Composition 409" and Gary Snyder                 
    reading his poem "Long Hair"

                                                            Jefferson Hansen in 1992

                                                            (photo by Tom Raworth)

Freelancin' 

    after james "blood" ulmer's album "freelancin'"

Texts

Composition 409 : "Long Hair"

 

    written in the days following first hearing Anthony Braxton's "Composition 409" and Gary Snyder
    reading his poem "Long Hair"

 

after walking alone all morning on trails in the park that meandered deep into the woods and along the river I came upon a crowd on the trail to the beach they talked excitedly and pointed through a thicket of thin-trunked spindly trees where a deer stood its flank towards us its head turned so wide eyed it could consider us maybe ten people stood on the asphalt trail pointing and exclaiming I grew concerned we made the deer nervous and turned to climb the steps up the tall escarpment I grew winded halfway up and flicked my long locks behind my shoulders to keep them out of my face panting my foot finally landed on flat ground just beyond the last step and just as it did the ground shuddered a strange light flashed as the brown-feathered hawks descended

 

                                                      before describing

                                                      what happened next

                                                      I must say

                                                      I felt no pain

                                                      the bloody dismemberment

                                                      I describe happened

                                                      in some strange dimension

                                                      within what we call

                                                      "reality"

                                                      that reveals more

                                                      than any sensations

                                                      or conceptions

 

                                    a hawk perched

                                    on my chest

                                    talons digging 

                                    through shirt

                                    into skin

                                    it reared back

                                    its head

                                    eyes fierce

                                    and jammed its

                                    beak into my right eye

                                    plucking it out

                                    I felt no pain 

                                    so this was no normal

                                    dismemberment

 

                  feeling blood flow

                  down my right cheek

                  I watched

                  with my left eye

                  as the hawk again

                  reared back

                  and crashed its open beak

                  into my left eye

                  again I felt no pain

                  the hawk said

                  "I'm chewing"

                  and I could not

                  see 

 

                                    a hawk landed

                                    on my right shoulder

                                    another on my left

                                    I could feel each

                                    poking at my ear canal

                                    with some stick-like

                                    tool finally

                                    they jammed it in

                                    piercing my ear drum

                                    again I felt no pain

                                    but sensed the blood

                                    flowing down to my jaw

                                    beneath my ears

 

I walked stumbling down the asphalt trail somehow I knew to keep moving some strange sense kept me on the trail going somehow straight I never stepped off the asphalt I had been reduced to pure nerve and my nerve said to keep moving in my blindness in my deafness when another hawk I could feel landed on my chest talons digging in again I sensed a strange swoop and it grabbed my nose in its beak and painlessly wrenched it off in this strange dismemberment beyond all usual bodies

 

                  perhaps

                  I smelled through blood

                  I saw through blood

                  I heard through blood

 

                                                      the hawks had eaten

                                                      me senseless

 

                                    while walking on

                                    I touched my hand

                                    to my face

                                    felt the sticky blood

                                    in my beard

                                    wondered if I were

                                    ever to be whole

                                    again

 

through the blood of my ears I could amazedly hear a creature who identified itself as a hawk say "we have eaten your senses you are in us now and see through us and hear through us and smell through us you are the hawk man though we are not hawks we are microbes gone grown up and all rogue in our roguishness we have bequeathed to you the possibility of new sight new hearing new smelling we have given you the possibility of a whole new world we do it for we do it just as the leaf falls from the tree for no reason and the water etches its way for no reason into granite over the eons"

 

                  the soles of my feet

                  touched asphalt

                  touched the pebbles there

                  felt the strange cracks

                  and crevices 

                  I realized I had

                  lost my shoes on feet that

                  never came close

                  to veering off

                  the asphalt

                  guided by a strange sense

                  was it hawk sense

 

                                                      my long hair

                                                      I felt

                                                      brushed against

                                                      my shoulder blades

                                                      I touched my chest hair

                                                      realized I wore no

                                                      shirt

 

                                    I felt for my shorts

                                    and touched only skin

                                    I realized

                                    I was naked

                                    bloody naked

                                    eyeless earless and noseless

                                    walking endlessly down 

                                    the asphalt

 

slowly I heard things other than the hawk voice I heard other birds twittering and tweeting I heard their foreign songs through the bloodied ears time suddenly slipped through an unknown knot and uncurled before me into the wormholes of spacetime and became a circle as I became a circle too all around me birds sang I heard them through the blood I heard their sound circling in spacetime I heard through death the death of my ears

 

                                                      walking on

                                                      I began to see pink

                                                      through the blood

                                                      all was tinted

                                                      pink

                                                      and the pink gave way

                                                      to a light green which

                                                      grew denser and thicker

                                                      and became a dark dark

                                                      luxuriant green

                                                      and I saw

                                                      finally

                                                      the leaves on the trees

                                                      through my blood eyes

                                                      through my hawk eyes

 

                                    the leaves looked

                                    a succulent green

                                    a green more vivid

                                    than any I had ever

                                    seen before

 

                  a branch hung low

                  over the trail

                  as I ducked under it

                  I pulled off a leaf

                  stuck it in my mouth

                  and chewed away

                  I still had no nose

 

oh, the leaf tasted bitter but it was a good bitter it was the bitter of green the green I knew somehow somewhere I needed to have I chewed and chewed its bitterness and broke it to pieces in my mouth some of it spindly after swallowing some bits I realized I was a microbe gone grown up and gone all rogue in my roguishness I smelled manure from somewhere unknown and I knew I smelled it hawkish through the blood of some stylized dismemberment swallowing more bits of leaf

 

                                    suddenly finding myself

                                    naked and knee deep

                                    in a roiling rapids

                                    a fully dressed man

                                    in waders and gloves

                                    and big hat

                                    fly fished 

                                    with his back 

                                    toward me

 

                  I called to him

                  he slowly turned

                  his head

                  under his hat

                  was a face

                  of white white 

                  skull

 

                                                      I waded away

                                                      from him

                                                      and walked

                                                      down a beach

                                                      naked and bloody

                                                      and noseless

                                                      hearing rapids

                                                      crashing into rocks

 

wading back into the edge of the rapids I dunked my head of long hair into the cool water I heard underwater the gurgling of the rapids I wiped the caked blood from my jaws and cheeks and face after noticing my nose had returned and I was whole once again I lifted my wet hair out of the water and snapped my head back to make the hair slap against my shoulder blades I saw above me the mirage of blue that is the sky and realized it was my friend and that the trees too were my friends and they awaited patiently my words which came with no effort 

 

                  "deathlife is 

                  long hair yesterday

                  long hair today

                  long hair forevermore"

 

                                    with that declaration

                                    I realized the strange lesson

                                    the brown-feathered hawks

                                    had so brutally bequeathed me

                                    that I am the living dead

                                    that I see partly with dead cells

                                    hear partly with dead cells

                                    that I touch through layers

                                    of dead skin cells

                                    I know only through death

 

                                                      there is no life

                                                      there is no death

                                                      there is only lifedeath

                                                      inextricably one

                                                      like spacetime

 

                                                                        sometimes

                                                                        the only way to know

                                                                        is to be shocked

                                                                        into it

                                                                        sometimes by brutality

                                                                        itself

 

my words echoed back repeatedly between the mirage of sky and the rapids I waded in the words curled up and shot away in strange trajectories action at a distance and through knowledge denied to conventional cognition but open to the paradoxical ecstatic embrace that is total somatic response to the eternal flux of things and processes blending and dissolving bleeding and abling and disabling I sensed my words had arrived action at a distance through wormholes to odd nooks and crannies weird eddies both churning and turning gently to resound or peep as the case may be even unto parallel universes

 

                  in all these offbeat

                  faraway hidden places

                  these words resounded

 

                                    LOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG

                  

                                    HAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

____________________

Freelancin’

 

            after james “blood” ulmer’s album “freelancin’”

 

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”   —Chuang Tzu, (369 BC-286 BC)

 

the ghost of chuang tzu

came to me last night

to say the universe

is infinitely wise

wise beyond all

human conception of wisdom

the distance of alpha centauri

from earth

 

to respond to this wisdom 

he said we must go local

attune ourselves to the polyrhythms there

hear the big beats and little beats

the shuffling and sharp ones

the brushed and sticked ones

and shake it on down

until the dirt feels the rub of the butt

 

chuang tzu told me that, yeah,

he’s a jazzer

he’s always been a jazzer

even in 300 BC China

because the blood reaches

back that far

reaches back and forward

in its electric shock

its electric shout

its shumble and stumble

 

chuang tzu said he came back

as charlie christian

who dazzled that benny goodman band

with electric Taoism

all the way to the coal-burning electric plants

of the 30s

 

and now chuang tzu is blood

and blood never ceases

the moon is blood

and the sun is blood

and every blade of grass stretches toward the sun

because of blood

the age of blood

knows no bounds

 

like

 

a photon traveling at the speed of light

knows no time

according to einstein

it travels space in no elapsed time

so to it there is no spacetime

all is absolutely here absolutely now

 

what is more real

light years based in human perception

or the perception of a photon

there is no reason

to put human perception

at any center

 

so time is not what we think

and photons scurry through blood

and the blood reaches forward

reaches backward

through time and culture

 

and this is how chuang tzu

is a ghost and not a ghost

is blood and not blood

is freelancin’ his way through

the collision of centuries

from the perspective of gluons

amid electric guitar buzz

skittering runs down the fretboard

 

we are always/

            never

                        home

____________________________

Gary Snyder can be seen reading "Long Hair" at Wang Ping's YouTube Page.

Anthony Braxton's "Composition 409" is on this boxed set.

JeffersonHansen.com