Hideko Sueoka-III

Where is my home?

 

III  Lisette Model: Blind Man with Guitar

   (Born in Austria)

 
 

   At the edge of the earth, at lilac dusk

   the blind man I know by hearsay has

   espied light at a part of the arabesque.

 
 

   As ever he plucks strings, engrossed in tunes

   even if there’re rowdies around him;

   then making them serene, besotted with his

 
 

   refrains, melancholic and exotic, slim

   child-stumbling paced phrases, every music

   he plays he could take as read as a hymn.

 
 

   His ears opened to voices in any stich

   alive to a wind calling, grown silence

   pococurante to the public.

 
 

   His eyes closed to secular affairs and balance,

   clairvoyant to an infant’s senses and heart

   competent to read the moonlight presence.

 
 

   Among nocturnal murmurs, his skilled art

   blooming in nifty riffs as When Day is Done

   of Django Reinhardt in Paris, his fingers’ dart

 
 

   lush-flinging winsome dissonances, one

   suspended-chord to another, a spate

   of passion, an abrupt break, then pun,

 
 

   and fret. Tones gone soon with him like a busker, et

 
 
 

*** Django Reinhardt (1910 – 1953) — Belgian-born French musician of Romani heritage, famous for using only the index and middle fingers of his left hand and establishing his own jazz guitar technique.