Miles Davis cradling his gleaming

trumpet, three black jazzmen slouched

like hipster guardian angels just

behind him. Searing coals those eyes,

as they stare out from the photo at you.

The jagged blue-black mosaic shards

of Justinian's eyes under the golden

dome of San Appollinare, unblinking there

these fifteen hundred years. Listen long

enough, and you will hear the arpeggios

those eyes attend to. Hart Crane, doomed

pilgrim that he was, surely must have heard

them. At least his songs report back

that he did, descending from the giant harp

he called the Bridge. Lorca heard it too,

his dear dark lady, moonbright pupils facing

that blind unblinking firing squad. Father

Hopkins refused our four-bar player piano

measures, listening hard instead for the strain

of plainchant groaning off the stones

of Delphi, an ancient music flaking down

the Dead Sea cells of Qumran monks, or Monte

Cassino's choir stalls, before it disappeared

into the vast insolid Void. Others too,

they say, have heard it in the timeless

vortices of time. And now, if they have

anything at all to tell me, it is this:

my time, like yours, friend, is drawing

to a close, my one ear dead since birth,

the other closing down that much more

each month. Most go about their business

day by day. They keep their heads down

or learn to simply wait. Here and there

someone points or gestures here or there.

Unheard melodies, Keats called them, eyes

ablaze, then dimming as his body fell apart.

Once my own eyes blazed, but that was then.

Too late, someone else is singing. Too late.

But the high flung bells—if anyone can or cares

to hear them—keep choiring in the haunted risen wind.