Mal Waldron

 I was drifting off to sleep, with Radio 3 playing softly, when a strangely beautiful piece of music caught my ear. It was clearly jazz of some kind, but darkly coloured and angular and, with its big chords and rapidly repeated notes, it barely sounded like jazz. It was, I soon discovered, All Alone, written and played by Mal Waldron – 

Mal Waldron... the name rang a very loud bell. Of course – the brilliant closing lines of Frank O'Hara's best-known poem, 'The Day Lady Died'. Waldron was, among many other things, Billie Holiday's regular accompanist, from 1957 until she died in 1959...

It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                        I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing