Dear Frank,

When I walk around at lunchtime
I can’t help but stop for good beer,
read a poem by you, and think

how little has changed.
You were meeting LeRoi for fish
and ale when you heard Miles Davis

was clubbed—twelve times—
by a cop outside Birdland.
This was August 25th in 1959,

eight days after Kind of Blue
first spun for our world’s dull ears.
He had wrapped his broadcast

for troops, then walked
this white girl to her cab
in an alley. Now I don’t know

if Daunte Wright cared at all
for Kind of Blue. Or what music
was playing—just eight days ago—

when a cop pulled him over
for his overdue plates, or the air-
freshener hanging from his rearview,

before she grabbed her gun—
which she said she thought
was her taser—and killed him

not far from where George Floyd
was killed. But I’m sure both men
must’ve longed to be loved. Just like you

said you longed to be loved—when you
finished that meal of fish and ale,
then talked of walking on girders,

wearing a bright silver hard-hat
with a crew of strong men
at your side, looking down on the streets

of New York. Wondering if one
single person, in a city of roughly 8,000,000,
might also be thinking of you.

Dear Frank,

Though the day is long, let it be
some long sort of rhapsody, like the long

song of sunlight in May. Or the way
that sunlight feels warmer

when wearing a soft black shirt—that fabric
indifferent to skin beneath it

but warming your skin all the same.
Just like dirt is indifferent to seeds

and potatoes—which I planted this morning—
but that dirt, indifferent, still helps

these small things grow. And that dirt’s
a dark moon in the nail of my thumb,

still swirled in the whorls of my palms,
as I sit here thinking and writing

of you and Elizabeth Taylor—who once
took too many pills—and of sunlight and slips

of potatoes. How before sitting down for a beer
at this bar, I dropped my daughter

at dance class. We parked and I folded
a tissue, which she slipped in a slipper

so her feet might hurt less. The radio droned
about rockets in Gaza, said they now

rained down from the sky. And like that,
we were talking of war. How rockets

are nothing like rain, and how rain is nothing
like rockets. I want to tell her, some days

burn a blister, that others are songs you hold
like a dream—that this, in time, is what you learn.

Britton Shurley is author of the chapbook Spinning the Vast Fantastic (Bull City Press, 2021), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as Southern Humanities Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Southern Indiana Review. He is the past recipient of Emerging Artist Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council and is currently a Professor of English at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.