I love the cool feel-around of this poem and I like how the narrator was sorting thru experiences to define "repose/" I thought the second stanza was the strongest. Particularly stellar was this passage:
Allowing things to just
drip
off you.
Remember well, seeing Miles and Freddie Hubbard and even, of late, Nicolas Peyton.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]>
To: POETRYETC <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tue, Feb 11, 2020 12:55 pm
Subject: Repose - a draft
Having repose
They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they
had repose - Dick said no American men had repose, except himself, and they
were seeking an example to confront him with.
- F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
i
Before cool,
before Brando,
before Birth of the Cool,
the 1949 Miles sessions,
even before Lester Young,
ten years before that,
Scotty’s Dick Diver had repose
in spades.
And sought,
largely in vain,
fellow reposers.
He had his Zelda-like Nicole of course
and besotted 18 yo Rosemary
and he had Paris.
ii
What’s cool?
Stepping back,
stepping out?
Ability to take it
on the chin perhaps.
Unruffledness.
Allowing things to just
drip
off you.
Not restricted to jazz musicians
or Jazz Age hipsters,
cricketers can be cool.
But not all.
Shane Warne may have spun himself
into the record books
but was too ornery
to have repose.
Look to black for that -
gum-chewing, all-smiting Viv Richards,
even fielding at mid-on had it in his smile
or even white Waugh, Mark,
the seconds-older twin of captain Steve,
finesser of strokes,
accepter of swished outs with aplomb,
surely displayed repose.
Top flight sportsmen, purring actors, musicians,
socialites, are not the only ones.
Unselfish, stylish flourishes
can be the province
of any of us.
Unless
we know it.
bw
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