Horace Silver Hexagonal Blues, and: Lessons Ending in Allegheny Plum

Horace Silver Hexagonal Blues, and: Lessons Ending in Allegheny Plum Iain Haley Pollock (bio) Keywords nature, honey, combs, labor, family, teacher, students, lessons HORACE SILVER HEXAGONAL BLUES Horace Silver's left hand sailing along the eboniesand ivories has me thinking, though I do not wantto think, about respectability politics. Who knows why? No, be honest: I've played them all my life,though not always on purpose. Be honest: samedifference. Whether or not I meant to, I have kept the honeyed class in their honey. I want to stopworking the 'combs. I want me to live in disrepute. To pickthe corn from between my front teeth with the long nail of an index finger. To wipe my nose clean with a forearm sleeve.To throw popcorn and insults in the cinema's dark silence.To eat every meal with my hands, to tongue the leftover sweet from my knuckles. That none of this will happen is notHorace Silver's fault—I did this to myself, let the hivebe spun around me (and did some spinning too), ground myself with labor until even the most respectable musicsounded like fear. Be honest: all these hours worrying 'combsand worrying honey build to my body losing its scent of wax, and my kin dragging me out, dropping medown into some field distant from the hivewhere I don't have to work these hexagons no more. End Page 87 LESSONS ENDING IN ALLEGHENY PLUM The furrows in a brain are called sulci.The capstones to pyramids are calledpyramidion. I, the teacher, learnedall this from my students. I learned toothat adolescents tend not to completeessays when their fathers are ventilated& dying. Or, when each day at schoolthey get called faggot. These are not the lessons I intended to teach or be taught,but they are the lessons I have for you today.Tomorrow, I doubt these lessons will change.Maybe father will be mother. Maybe the epithetwill be nigger. Maybe there will be more of them.Lessons. And all about as acid as an Allegheny plum. End Page 88 Iain Haley Pollock iain haley pollock is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James Books) and Spit Back a Boy (U. Georgia Press). His work has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. Pollock directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, and lives in the lower Hudson Valley. Copyright © 2024 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.