THE ROAD TO TEMOZÓN

The road to Temozón is pure jazz. Sunburned old Maya men on black bicycles overloaded with firewood, sleek Cancún tourist buses with Costamaya lettered watery blue, white clouds in blue sky, dog-bark-green slashed-&-burned fields tufted with corn and joyous weeds and skull-white limestone rocks, rainbow roadkill, gray asphalt, sunlight and wind and heat with butterflies, "my" squeaking bicycle pedals needing oil, "my" in quotes because here "I" go again losing "myself," diffusing outward until there's no out, no in, no "me," ¿see? Sí, hee hee. Jazz.

So, in the beginning there was a boxy little white house in the Kentucky farmlands among shadowy Boxelders and Red Maples, dogs named Whitey and Prince, Mama & Daddy, big yellow schoolbus on the gravel road, tobacco fields and soybean fields, a big, falling-apart barn with corncribs and stalls, a white Cumberland Presbyterian church on Church Hill, all Key of C, no sharps or flats, all whole notes, half notes and quarter notes but nothing more, improvisation verboten then: Cymbal clash November 22, 1963/ Vietnam/ Little Rock and Selma kaboom!, and now that thing with all that jazz-with-prelude inside goes trundling down the road to Temozón, and that's jazz, too.

The question arises, then, How does the road to Temozón, and this trundling entity on the road -- both purportedly jazz -- relate?

It's jazz inside jazz.

And there's more jazz than that, like, the jazz of tortillas-and-beans-and-woodsmoke backcountry Mexico wrapping around this jazz of the Road to Temozón, and on up, skipping a lot, the jazz of Earth's photosynthesizing, carbon-cycling, living, dying, rejuvenating biosystem, and more skipping to solar system jazz and all its geometry, gravity fields and alignments, and on to swirling, black-holed, new-stars-forming galaxy jazz, and then Universe jazz that can only be described in poetry, or silence, and it works the other way, too, like, inside the trundler there's this jazz of bacteria and intestinal worms grooving their own universe of digestive enzymes, cosmically streaming nutrients, and inside that bacteria and worms, still skipping a lot, there's amino acid molecules dancing to their own jazz, jitterbugging through semipermeable membranes, jockeying to become proteins, and on down inside the molecules there's jazz of electrons around protons, the electrons' near-speed-of-light weirdness and electrical charges like yin and yang pulling and shoving and making time, and way down subatomic particles' eternal eruptive lightnings pirouetting through their own crazy, cozy universes, jazz inside jazz all the way down and all the way up, and I can even think of sideways jazz but by now you're getting the picture, that, really, it's all just the Big Theme being worked out, the Mother of all Improvisation riffing here and there, in other words that its the One Thing being Herself and, with Her,

there's no in
there's no out
there's just jazz
all about