Last Call By Michael Brockley

Phil blew two saxophones at once in between his vocals on “Sweet Home Chicago” and “My Girl.” He soothed his saxophones with linebacker hands, tenored, You don’t need no ticket. Just climb on board, to the back of the room at Doc’s Music Hall, and saluted guests at his shows with a run on the devil’s horn. On Sunday afternoons Phil would treat the poets of middle America to a sweet-and-salty cookie while picking up gumbo at a Creole diner. I nodded to him at the checkout counter of the library. Or at the soul food restaurant across the street from the used record store that sold me aloha shirts. For some reason I always confused Phil’s “My Girl” with the Temptation’s torch, “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me).”

Twenty-five years ago I recognized Ruth as she exited a Border’s in Indianapolis. Arm in arm with a man who spat on the sidewalk. Why did I believe in those three-minute illusions? “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “My Girl.” Songs that harmonized fables for a fool over a rhapsodic lure. The night Ruth stood me up in college, I cycled through the greatest hits of Leonard Cohen and Smokey Robinson on my Circle of Sound. And “Just My Imagination,” of course. All while wishing I could have crooned a verse from a Motown chestnut into a cloud-nine serenade. One of those ballads with a baritone who growls, Every night, woman, on my knees I pray…

I sit alone at a bar table, chasing stale Fritos with ginger ale. Listening to Phil caress the keys on his horn while I whisper the familiar rhymes to myself. Day and May. Heavenly and reality. Sometimes I nurse a whiskey sour. Until the night surrenders to the last song on the band’s playlist. Doc tickling and teasing a funny valentine from his keyboard and Phil riffing on the sax. Just a melody summoned from a 2 a.m. Hoosier fog and a fedora worn crooked over a lazy eye. An hour too late for lyrics.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Prole, Barstow and Grand, and The Whiskey Mule Diner. Poems are forthcoming in Ryder Magazine, Punk Noir Magazine, Of Rust and Glass, and Stormwash: Environmental Poems.