Percussion - D.R. James
Percussion
—for Derek
All summer I shadow your band
from the porch: London to Rome,
Lausanne to Amsterdam,
a week on Sardinia, then back
to Liverpool, Mecca of my youth.
And besides my usual obsessions—
your precarious health, the requisite
excesses—I worry over
each venue’s resident drum kit—whether
there will be two toms, a kick-drum,
high-hat, ride and crash cymbals,
a decent snare—and whether
the bale of the bucket,
the turquoise floor-mop bucket,
the one your older brother
rigged up for you
from the laundry room
to be your bright bass drum,
will still slip easily
over your head and your
Dutch-boy bangs
to lead the parade
of neighbor kids, kazoos,
garbage-lid cymbals,
up one side of Fourteenth Street
and down the other, forever
marching, forever playing
my arrhythmic heart
back here in Holland,
Michigan.
Originally published by Jerry Jazz Musician, August 22, 2023
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).
