A poem from Frank fan Bruce Taylor.
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The Year The Crooner Died
Le Corbusier completes his Chapel
of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp
while in 30,000 motels all across America
stunned flies die agonized dreamy
and demented on the window sills.
It was the year men stopped
shining their shoes, guys who had
the world on a string, it was the summer
the string broke. No one could wear
a hat cocked at any angle after that
and gals and dolls and chicks in
brassieres pale blue and bulletproof,
in exotic fur and zircon chokers swooned
to nothing else all night on the radio
as if they ever had much before.
The S.S. Andrea Doria goes down in a heavy fog
60 miles off Nantucket.
Jackson Pollock is run down on Long Island.
Polish workers riot at Poznan.
Gas is 29¢ a gallon. Broadway went one way
There were a hundred words for guys
who were crooked, stupid, cheap.
Everybody knew a moke, a dope
or a punk as soon as he showed up
but there was only one word for him.
The year they razed the 3'rd Avenue El
the year coke became Coke
the year they introduced Crest and Special K
the year it was an all New York Series
and the Bums finally won.
"Cool," of course, comes to mind,
not the smart ass way they say it today,
not flip and slickly ironic, but the way
everybody who knew what it meant
used to say it then, "Cool."
{continued with stanza break}
And not any of the dozen ways
we learned to say it later,
beat, broken, black-listed
and Buddha-ed out,
not even the way the brothers
sassed, saxed and slapped it,
hopelessly hip, high and jive
or how some had to say it later,
hushed and out of harm's way ,
a chill warning to be still,
or irreproducibley, in the 60's,
unless you're on acid at the time
and one C minus away from Vietnam,
all intake of breath and a giving out,
up off and over to everything
but slow and low, like slipping into
something silky brown and smokey,
like breathing in to breathe out,
like believing "Cool," was something
someone could still get away with being.