Jazz Night at the Museum

by Leonore Hildebrandt

For the modernist, an egg shattered in the street.
     A heart?  Straggling notes court the monkey tree.
          “It may take sixty years until the bamboo

finally blooms,” you say, “and then the whole plant dies.”
     The dimly – lit blues ballad murmurs intimacies:
          sea lavender in gilded frames.

A break, and the man in the vintage hat
     works the crowd: a trumpeter from Moscow!
          Three horns — their fictions prolifically bounding up

grand stairs and corridors, to the landscapes —
     the field – rubble after winter, a sky over – clouding —
          to rosy bathers, nudes draped on luscious cloth.

Outside, taxis.  We circumvent downtown’s clusters,
     its ravines and cliffs funneling a harsher wind —
          installations in a troubled key.