Photo of Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike, 1968

Photo of Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike, 1968

By Cornelius Eady b. 1954 Cornelius Eady
New York grows   
Slimmer
In his absence.   
I suppose

You could also title this picture   
Of Miles, his leathery
Squint, the grace
In his fingers a sliver of the stuff

You can’t get anymore,
As the rest of us wonder:   
What was the name
Of the driver

Of that truck? And the rest
Of us sigh:
Death is one hell   
Of a pickpocket.

Cornelius Eady, “Photo of Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike, 1968” from Autobiography of a Jukebox. Copyright © 1997 by Cornelius Eady. Used by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Source: The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997)

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Poet Cornelius Eady b. 1954

POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern

Subjects Arts & Sciences, Music, Living, Death, Photography & Film

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Cornelius Eady

Biography

Poet and cofounder of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist. Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2008.

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SUBJECT Arts & Sciences, Music, Living, Death, Photography & Film

POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Originally appeared in Poetry magazine.

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