A Jazz Pianist

A large, bearish man sat down
Wearing a knitted stove pipe hat
Sculptor hands size of dinner plates
Fingers straight like a karate master
Not a classical player

Piano pours forth like a poem
Flowing from a germ cell
Unrhymes and enjambments
Flowering into a bright melody
Chordal clusters gracefully smashed
A keyboard dancer with a boxer’s punch

One note can be as small as a pinhead
One note can contain the world
One note is selected from a hundred
Chosen like a perfect pearl
He left silences where others glissando
Implied more than was said
Those infinite rests and spaces
Kept us waiting in suspense

His rhythma-ning was infectious
Delicious and dissonant licks
Lifting up the bandstand
And Bemsha really did swing

Decades later, I sit here and play along
To his reflections at midnight
Why is ugly beauty so euphonious
A lovely paradox
There was only one Thelonious