Open G for Blind Joe Death
In a California coffeehouse
You struck the strings of a big guitar.
Finger rolls and slides and strums,
Judgment Day in the whisky jar,
Love and falling out of love.
And now your music comes around again,
Your marches, your waltzes - time's cotillion.
You in your grave, I hear you once more
In the lacunae, the lacrimae,
In all the spent dreams of life.
You'd been far-seeing with your
Finger-picking style-
-John Fahey, of all the exponents of your instrument
America in her blisses and agonies spawned,
The most Arcadian, the most caustic of them,
You orchestrated for our delectation
An American Dis in seventh chords,
You Mississippi John Hurt and Theocritus,
Blind Blake, Bukka, Patton and Virgil
Of the Eclogues messianic and otherwise,
Your years, what else? bittersweet:
1939 - 2001.
Grandstanding
-for M.S.
Yes, I took her under the grandstand where
I kissed her questioning countenance and
Touched her breast, she curious to see
How a touch of this sort felt.
And yes, she was pleased, was more than pleased
To have been kissed, touched, romanced,
To have had the opportunity to rate,
She up until then overlooked.
A Somebody on Campus, I advanced her cause:
Good news! - there was no Old Maid in her in this her inaugural
High school year, America at home in Germanland.
And she figured that love deserved her best approving smile.
What had attracted me in the first instance?
Those black eyes, the appealing freckle, the blushing ankles,
The way she moved, the way she took her time to speak,
And maybe she was more than a shy looker,
So much so, she stood her ground, seeking due,
Taking note of what would befall her - some tingle or another,
Filing it somewhere for a future of love.
Future? Years would go by before I was ever again
As brazen, as sure, as outright cavalier,
No baseball diamond around in which arena
I'd been but a tadpole the previous summer
Fighting life and death battles, no seducer, no player consummate
In the game she knew she'd play before I did-
Yet, here's the thing - for all that I recall, I can't remember
Anything she ever said, she that quiet, that meditative perhaps,
Concerns on her mind beyond how things felt-
Yes, would the happy occupation of a defeated enemy
Give way, soon enough, to another front
Or the U.S.A. of Dallas, Saigon, Kent State,
Love falling away forever from love?
Yankee Boy in Baseball Gear
(from Sub Divo)
Can you stand to hear it, Eric, how
the yankee boy in baseball gear,
His mitt dangling from the handlebar,
Pedalled the bike through the potato field
Under the migratory thunder cloud? How he was on the way to
the army base
From Wallstadt where he lived, ancient hamlet that curdled the
nose
with coal and sour milk and beer,
with pigshit, with sweet confections,
and the nitrous odour of
war bride bitterness
not far from Heidelberg, near Mannheim
that was terror-bombed in '41?
He was, just then, in unsupervised time,
An independent agent of the occupation, so much so
They were seeing a vision - those old women of loamy acreage,
beasts of burden, friendly hags
of toothless and cracked smiles.
It had rained, and the precocious boy,
knowing as he did
(even before he could hardly know)
That it was a lesson in Roman history, his being there,
That it was Germania, that it was he who could will that
the sun should shine
As he loved the game of baseball, was aching to play, that evening,
Hoping against hope there'd be no rainout,
the parents quarrelling, father in his cups
who'd love one and all and everybody
and Mario Lanza, goodtime tenor.
And the women, somewhat tickled
With the boy's presumption, for all that he was an American
who could boss the sun around,
Were amused, smiles all the more cracked and pungent.
(Simple agricultural spirits, hey, Eric, and this not so long
After the horrors of the war?)
In their voluminous skirts,
Scarfed and aproned, they were
hunkered to the sod,
so many sunflowers there,
As if they themselves were the products of a seed,
Black earth tangy from rain, the light of the sun
Straining to gain purchase, the boy in league with the rainbow's
Glimmer.
Some of the women raised their arms
to this their hierophany of a lad,
And he, he may as well have been Adonis for
All those weathered faces, crones whose inner imps
were Aphrodites of a river's plain.
Too much the narrative for you - the words above?
As if Tacitus and The Katzenjammer Kids were of the same
Mind, not to mention the hangover, the regrets
In light of history's most destructive conflict-
Even so, the memory of it now and then
Rears up from where memories bide their time
Patiently, in anticipation of doing their worst,
And what was now simply is: a pastoral, a piece
Of bucolic legerdemain, as were you and your outback
And the smell of ozone after a storm.