
Meditation on Willie Mae*
(*Willie Mae Powell, a woman who loved delta bluesman Robert Johnson)
You left us all behind in the end.
Every last one.
Your voice, too. Left that scrimshawed
on those old records, singing
through skillet crackle and cotton bales.
Sometimes of a summer evening,
after the day birds go quiet
and night lays its tattered porkpie
over Mississippi,
I open--
like a pocketknife
ready for the peach--
lying back in my lawn chair
and the darkness, waiting
for your revival show.
No evangelist flails.
No repentance demanded.
Just time parting its curtains, slow
as a gator pushing through weeds.
That’s where I find you--
or is it that you find me?--
among the congregants behind my eyes,
rising and falling away at will.
You astonished me so.
You astonish me still.
I could put my hand through you now
if you genied out of my head,
and yet,
your phantom witches and woos
so well, I forget to remember
that you no longer live
in your body.
And I spirit back
to where your feet slap the porch planks,
sending shudders to dance the cooch in me.
Your right arm drapes the hip of the guitar,
head tilting toward the strings
where your fingers skitter
like daddy longlegs worried by children.
And each song is a boxcar hitched
to your voice, hauling
all you know of your life,
all you don’t.
Like a hobo, I ride the music,
let the force of going shear
the world from me,
so that I fly
beyond the leavings of supper,
the smothered chicken and vinegared greens,
the whiskey you like too much
and crumbs of red velvet cake;
beyond the heat’s girdle, the resined light,
and the peonies feathering bitter rose
by the back steps.
I fly wonderstruck and unbodied
through the vibrating acres of sound,
and I think that this must be your sinner’s holy land,
the apple of your bad eye,
the place that has made you a walking fire.
But when the music quits,
that place and who we were
on that porch break my hold,
as though my memory of those things
takes flight on a trapeze
and escapes the catcher’s hands.
Instead, it is I who am caught,
recaptured
by my own flesh,
made once more an old woman
settled in her lawn chair.
On the return, I grieve a little,
but the questions come soon enough.
I wonder what it was that I loved.
Was it your fingertips’ rough strum
on my skin, your scent spiced
with satchel leather and storm wind,
your trickster’s smile?
Or was it your gift, burning bright as tungsten
in a fragile bulb, the fuel and the engine
of my beyond rides,
your acoustic soul?
Was I seduced by the storied aftermath
of your life, the songs
in which you named me your blue light,
your destiny?
Would I have loved you
if you’d never played guitar or sung a note?
Or did I love what was long gone
before your legend ripened,
before the poisoned liquor
and the sleep of your bones
said to be buried near Greenwood?
Is it your face I sometimes glimpse
in the window of a Greyhound,
your flirty spirit giving me a wink?
But no answers ever meet
these questions that reel out
in the darkness,
so I take solace in listening
to the creek frogs’ scraping choir
and the brambles rustling
with uncatchable things.
(*Willie Mae Powell, a woman who loved delta bluesman Robert Johnson)
You left us all behind in the end.
Every last one.
Your voice, too. Left that scrimshawed
on those old records, singing
through skillet crackle and cotton bales.
Sometimes of a summer evening,
after the day birds go quiet
and night lays its tattered porkpie
over Mississippi,
I open--
like a pocketknife
ready for the peach--
lying back in my lawn chair
and the darkness, waiting
for your revival show.
No evangelist flails.
No repentance demanded.
Just time parting its curtains, slow
as a gator pushing through weeds.
That’s where I find you--
or is it that you find me?--
among the congregants behind my eyes,
rising and falling away at will.
You astonished me so.
You astonish me still.
I could put my hand through you now
if you genied out of my head,
and yet,
your phantom witches and woos
so well, I forget to remember
that you no longer live
in your body.
And I spirit back
to where your feet slap the porch planks,
sending shudders to dance the cooch in me.
Your right arm drapes the hip of the guitar,
head tilting toward the strings
where your fingers skitter
like daddy longlegs worried by children.
And each song is a boxcar hitched
to your voice, hauling
all you know of your life,
all you don’t.
Like a hobo, I ride the music,
let the force of going shear
the world from me,
so that I fly
beyond the leavings of supper,
the smothered chicken and vinegared greens,
the whiskey you like too much
and crumbs of red velvet cake;
beyond the heat’s girdle, the resined light,
and the peonies feathering bitter rose
by the back steps.
I fly wonderstruck and unbodied
through the vibrating acres of sound,
and I think that this must be your sinner’s holy land,
the apple of your bad eye,
the place that has made you a walking fire.
But when the music quits,
that place and who we were
on that porch break my hold,
as though my memory of those things
takes flight on a trapeze
and escapes the catcher’s hands.
Instead, it is I who am caught,
recaptured
by my own flesh,
made once more an old woman
settled in her lawn chair.
On the return, I grieve a little,
but the questions come soon enough.
I wonder what it was that I loved.
Was it your fingertips’ rough strum
on my skin, your scent spiced
with satchel leather and storm wind,
your trickster’s smile?
Or was it your gift, burning bright as tungsten
in a fragile bulb, the fuel and the engine
of my beyond rides,
your acoustic soul?
Was I seduced by the storied aftermath
of your life, the songs
in which you named me your blue light,
your destiny?
Would I have loved you
if you’d never played guitar or sung a note?
Or did I love what was long gone
before your legend ripened,
before the poisoned liquor
and the sleep of your bones
said to be buried near Greenwood?
Is it your face I sometimes glimpse
in the window of a Greyhound,
your flirty spirit giving me a wink?
But no answers ever meet
these questions that reel out
in the darkness,
so I take solace in listening
to the creek frogs’ scraping choir
and the brambles rustling
with uncatchable things.