RHYTHM

Claude Hopkins is playing

I Got Rhythm, ignoring the circumstance

That he’s been dead since 1984

Where he is, it’s 1941

And he’s in a Brunswick studio 

Where the Muses, looking for inspiration,

Have dropped by. (He’s aware

They visited Art Tatum first

And that Tatum chased them off.)

Crowded into the small studio 

Are Hopkins, his piano, the equipment 

An engineer and nine muses. Making it worse 

Erato, an incurable romantic, has invited 

The Muses' estranged cousins, the Furies

To accompany them. There are only three Furies 

But they take up a lot of space. Perversely,

They've started jitterbugging though not

In time to the music, ignoring Terpsichore's pleas

That they stop. The engineer is falling in love

With the youngest Fury, Tisiphone;

Her name means "vengeful destruction;"

It will probably not go well between them.

Hopkins is not worried. It's 1940;

It's now; he's alive then, dead now

And either way he's playing I Got Rhythm.