How to Write a Poem About the Blues

I set out to write a poem called “How to Be a Bluesman.” This poem was to be clever and knowing and verging on funny. It would have suggested being born in the late 1800s to parents who might or might not have been slaves. It would have quoted W.C. Handy and Alan Lomax and you would have been impressed at my knowledge. It would have offered Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana as an ideal starting point: some Southern state full of honeysuckle and cottonmouths. I would have felt a special connection to this section of the poem because I grew up in one of those places, where we picked blackberries and raised chickens. Also I can tell you about the smell of kudzu in the summer. It’s something like grapes, but not so lonely. This would have been that inevitable part of any poem where the tone changes from arch to sincere, and you as a reader would have been deeply moved. You might have yearned to have grown up in such a place yourself. Or you would have thought about your own childhood, and the tire swing that pendulumed off the pecan tree in your back yard and the fishbone scar on your side from the barbwire surrounding Gillespie’s pasture where you snagged yourself running away from a pissed-off bull, and the tender way the first real love of your life used to trace her fingertips along the scar’s question mark shape, over and over, in bed on lazy afternoons in one of those grad-school apartments in Tallahassee or Athens or Knoxville, and you would ask her what she was thinking, and she would smile and say nothing. Of course, she wasn’t the first love of your life but of mine and she’s years gone now, first loves never stay put in poetry or blues songs and not anywhere else, either. Thinking about the oatmeal-fleck freckles on her face made me so goddamned wistful I stopped writing and turned on some music.

Obituaries

He was good to his dogs but lost interest in baseball.
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His face was difficult to read — the inner surface of a turtle shell.
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Cowbirds were drawn to her back yard at sunset when the bloodmaples shimmered dark and alive like an oil spill.
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He always felt most comfortable in Alabama, in the yawning days of autumn, teaching others the secret to keeping beer cold in a brown paper sack.
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She outlived her usefulness but not her passions, her symmetry but not her beauty, her lover but not her husband.
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He married a succession of ever shorter women until the last fit neatly in the pocket of his favorite leather coat.
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He will be remembered for his knuckles: very small animals trying to escape from walnut shells.
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She wrote letters that spoke of snow and sometimes sex.
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He sold out young.
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Her life revealed the shortcomings of my own.

The Wolf Testifies on His Own Behalf

Here are my only sins: I know
the short cuts. And I encourage
the young women of Western Civilization
to embrace their sexuality — face it,
that’s what we’re talking about here.
You didn’t think Little Red Riding Hood
meant a little red riding hood, did you?
Think about it. I never understood
why you’re all so afraid
of your own flesh and blood.
Innocent until proven lupine.
I hear what you tell your children:
do not stray from the path
or set one foot amid the goldenrod,
milkweed, forget-me-not —
tarry not in the deepest woods,
where the stones are black
with mystery and the air
has the taste of saltwater,
I suppose I should be glad
your warnings are as meaningless
as mist, here in the dark
canopy of tree cover. What you fear
is not that I will slit their throats,
or even that they will taste blood
and like it, but that they will discover
that once upon a time
you yourself wandered here
of your own accord
to see if it was true — if desire
could never be slaked,
if it’s your own hunger
that makes it impossible
to live happily ever after.

26 Stories About Kissing in a Small Town

After the water releases the mist, a swan unfolds, seraphic in the flint light.
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Before, the taste of early winter.
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Cigarette mouth on a high school girl, breathing smoke into my body.
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Downtown behind the Dairy Shack, we float music in the salty sky of November.
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Even the river knows our future.
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Finding, to my surprise, your flesh willing but my spirit weak.
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Go, and come back when you’re afraid not to.
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Home is where the hunger is, the hunger greatest in the rain.
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I sometimes wake cold and unable to remember your name.
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Just as flesh finds flesh, want seeks the place where want is lacking.
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Keep my lips in a pocket close to your breast: a souvenir, physical evidence, a way of telling time.
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Last year, two years, a decade ago, what difference?
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Missed opportunities make strange bedfellows.
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Night before last, I dreamed of meeting you Christmas shopping.
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Only you pretended not to recognize yourself.
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Probably things that happen when we are seventeen don’t matter.
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Quickly, find a doorway and wait out the storm in the warm halo of my breathing.
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Regret, or not.
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Someday, someday.
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There’ll be time enough for sleeping when you’re not in love.
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Under the Sixth Avenue Bridge, a man watches us while he fishes for trout.
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Victimless crimes of the heart are his specialty.
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When I open my eyes, I see yours have been open the whole time.
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Exactly when were you planning to tell me you’ve moved on?
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Yes — yes.
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Zoom off into the sunset, go ahead, hop into your convertible and scatter my plans like flowers along some forgotten highway out of this place — but that swan, that swan, forgive me.