Michael Adams		"Sweet"   Horns & whiskey & the light graying into dawn, with Bird or Billie, or Ornette on the turntable, the only thing in that shitty basement apartment worth a damn. Only two or three of us left by then, so late, the hardcore, the sleepless, fueled by that inexhaustible need to grab it all, whatever it was, as much as we could, knowing all the while we could never get enough.   God, how we would talk, argue, fight for hours -- jazz, the Beats, the blues & rock & roll, Nixon, Kissinger, the war & all the goddamn liars.   There was booze & weed, plenty of it, but none of us burned as hot as you -- the white crosses so your body could soar as high as your heart & the Qualudes to drag you, finally, into dreamless sleep. Cockroaches & coke in the sugar bowl, none of us were saints, but you, you thought nothing could touch you.   & by God, for a while nothing could, holy & shining, the way you had with women, & that horn raw & sweet at the same time, so much beauty & pain at once, shards of glass & a wave-washed beach.   You came back but could never come home from the green hell of Vietnam with a craving nothing could fill for long & such a love like I’ve never seen for every breeze & tear & sunrise.   Oh you could blow, I mean that horn & you said you wanted to blow the whole damned laughing, crying, loving, dying, fighting world through that horn, breathe it all in & turn everything that was ugly holy.   Like that night-turning-to-morning you said, let’s go & we went up into the city & the sun came up orange & cold & you wet your lips & launched into Bird -- After You’ve Gone, while the bridges filled with cars & the sun burned off the frost & then you slowed it way down with I Can’t Get   Started, but what it was was you couldn’t stop & nobody could follow where you went & none of us could accept what you needed to give & finally we stopped trying. It wasn’t just me, I wasn’t the only one who cut you to the bone, but when you finally fled Pittsburgh for Denver on that 3 AM Greyhound nobody was happy but we all breathed a sigh of relief.   You sent a couple of letters at first, like Neal, boasting about all the girls, how bright the stars were, the huge heart of the night, a different address every month or so, & I sent a few postcards to whatever address I had, with not much to report on, & soon enough I stopped or you, I don’t remember.   We all settled into the routines we once said never to, but I’d think of you sometimes, knowing you could never settle into anything like a routine & years later I heard from somebody who heard from somebody that there was a bum they found frozen one January morning, an old vet from Pittsburgh they thought, with nothing to his name but an alto sax, who haunted Colfax Ave. & oh, but could he blow sweet.		Autumn Night: Cold Mountain   1. Late at night, I rise, unable to sleep, leave the long warm body of my wife to her dreams for the company of Han Shan and Shih Te.   Rain drips from the eaves, though the moon is out, washing the trees in bone-light.   So many sorrows in this life, so many joys!   I would leap the bounds of the earth, sit with the moon among clouds.   2. 2AM and sleepless,  I rise to the autumn darkness. Outside, streetlights swim in the rain.   I make coffee, embrace the long body of night.   3. The first rain of autumn wakes me and I am unable to return to sleep. My lover lies next to me, warm and content.   I think of Cold Mountain and long to leap the world’s ties, sit with him amongst the clouds.   I place my hand on the warm land of my lover, her hills and valleys.   Tears fill my eyes.