last set

(final evening, vancouver international jazz festival)

folding chairs;
warm lights in
cathedral colors;
faint acrid smoke
in tendril swirls.

piano chords—
convulsions,
no flow—
notes congeal &
fall flat-dead.

but then a dam bursts:
baritone sax
breaks loose a
whitewater-torrent,
roiling & bubbling,

lifting us on the
rush of round sounds,
notes rising, tides
& waves, streaming over
under, around us.

the motion stops,
stilled to calm
lakes of long
trumpet notes—
sleek, clean, lulling.

above bedrock beats,
solid-bass ground opens
channels to conduct
all this improvised
flow, improvised calm.