Into the Teeth of the Wind

Barry Spacks

Untitled

An experimentm, to see could she bear it,
this guy tries out “the ray” on his girl.
It’s a gaze he learned from a TV show
about clarinet-master Benny Goodman,
Benny who needed to work with the best,
who’d shoot the look his band called the ray
to pinion some miserable alto sax
on the taut strings of his eyes, perfectionist
Benny, boring in. So this lover
gives her his version of Goodman’s ray,
she with her sleepy smile, her near-sighted
squint that used to stir him so.
“What?” she says, so he shoots more ray,
she’s sweating there in the rhythm section,
he lifts his stick for the solo.