Moondog

Susan Kohn Green…

Suddenly I’m writing music

And remembering Moondog.

Do you even know who he was?

He used to stand on Sixth  Avenue

Around 56th Street ..

Oh, you couldn’t miss him! 

With his flowing bulk of a cape,

sometimes a blanket, a rug - 

His long white beard, 

His Antler Head dress - 

cap - hat - whatever ,

Leather - Nordic,

Spear in his hand ,

And how did we get started talking? 

He was playing the flute that day and

I suppose I thought he was standing 

There asking for money

And I suppose I walked toward him 

With some in my hand.

And stopped.

He stopped, too

Tilted his head toward me.

And I knew he was blind.

His eyes barely opened 

And through the slit in his right eye 

I saw only white.

How did he know I had stopped, Was there?

(I think he smelled the oil paint on my clothes…

Or on the painting I carried.

Or had it been the footsteps that stopped?) )

MoonDog taught me to listen.

“Hear that, Sue?”

The cadence of a conversation that passed by.

I closed my eyes.

The honking of cars,

A bark of a dog,

The rhythms of footsteps or a laugh.

“Hear that?”

The sudden ring of a bicycle bell

A bird - a surprise.

Somehow it all fit together.

I didn’t know he was famous then, 

The blind, homeless jazz composer

Of New York - had albums,

Was renown, 

Just that he taught me not to just hear,

Not even to just listen, 

But I heard him translate street noises 

Into music.

From him I learned that hearing is 

A different kind

Of sight.

Do you know what a moondog is?

They are sunlike spots on the fringes of the 

Halos of the moon - 

And rare. 

But that wasn’t it…

Although I think of him that way.

No,  Moondog named himself after

A howling dog he heard -

Howling, howling

At the moon, of course.

How he thought of himself… 

Making the music he made.

And now -  I heard a garbage truck in the night

Last night

And there was a bang and a slam and a churn

A hum, a “sluushhh” 

And it was no longer a garbage truck in the night.

It was a cacophony of sounds that fit together - 

if I listened for it.

And it came back to me…

Reminded me of Moondog.