Ornette Coleman, Mercury goes Direct & Bone

I haven’t kept up with the weekly poetry posts of Natasha Trethewey but today there was a poem share about the Brooklyn Bridge. Yesterday some other news article shared that Bill Murray walked hundreds of poets across the Brooklyn Bridge. I’m one for coincidences. I looked at Simic’s poem then clicked in another rhen saw the news: Ornette Coleman died yesterday. The last day of this current Mercury Retrograde. The other night, I was at a reading complaining with a poet friend about the sluggishness this MR has left me feeling. She too was feeling an onset of the sleepies. To battle my slug mind and body I dove into Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, a pitch-perfect narrative that captures row neighborhoods and one family that moves between these places. I’ve luxuriated in Ng’s book as I often luxuriated in Coleman’s sax. Sometimes all MR wants us to do is slow down, find stillness, luxuriate in art.