Indigo Skies


"Some great lyrics in that particular blog," Uncle Ted wrote.

My reply: Thanks Ted. I was almost embarrassed to write a blog in meter and rhyme. But then I saw Coretta's funeral service and thought, "Do I want to join the black people and have a peaceful god who likes to see his children dance and sing, or be one of the frozen chosen?"

Yesterday you will recall that I woke up in the morning with rhythmic disfunction. My malaise was born from a warning that if you are too happy it's too far to fall when the body's on the cooling board and flowers fall out of the sky all night long -- this malaise is an investment in the inevitability of tragedy -- imagine me laughing and dazed while it all slips away, never to return ...

So I burn a candle, my metaphorical identity, imagine me if I were a flame living in a fat red jar, my root a wick in wax, an attack on the substantiality of matter while taking tea with Alice and the hatter -- he's mad; did I tell you that? It's the mercury fumes that come from the hats -- with me it's the fillings in my molars or maybe I'm bi-polar.

Of course I'm bi-polar, every field is. There's a lion and a lamb, a sword and shield, kill or be killed. If I can manage to stay in the middle I can walk along the shore. I'll bet you thought I would rhyme that with fiddle but there are strings attached, and the potential of romantic images, because a fiddle is a violin without brains. There is always a violin waiting inside the fiddle, for that poignant moment of a breath drawn and held, the sickening crash of your world around you, sleep for years, then slowly rise back into the dance, like a fighter struggling up to beat the count, but the eyes are never the same again.

The fiddle runs along like a train on a track, outside of tragedy, mindless foot stomping escape into a poor man's ritual. This is something every man can do; come to the barn dance. Behind the fiddle's incessant laughing romp the guitar notes run like pipers along the mirror in the sand, finding fast food in the fingertips of the endless waves. What can you say about the bass except that that it knows the body because it feels of it in sensual sweeps and note runs, an artful lover. It keeps a beat of its own.

The barn is gone. They sold the wood to an interior decorator on the coast. A toast to an innocent past, and a guilty future, as the city flames alive and burns away a precocious pretending. I'm sending myself on ahead while I stay here with the car, to keep an eye on the luggage. Write if you get work, I say, as a joke.

My future has never presented in words.

He never will use them.

I tried to disabuse him of his insistence that we can't talk directly, now and then, but when you argue with your future you don't stand a chance. If you win it's all over anyway. You don't want to win that one. If you win that one, it's all over anyway.

At the barn dance a local boy has gone out of control and is chasing people with a hatchet, wants to ratchet up the fiddle rattle so he claims he's got battle fatigue and thought he was back in Bagdad, how can you argue with that? Sad but true, you never know when you're going to repeat your stories. They get hold of you. War is never having to say you're sorry and getting the prints of peace protesters in the suspicious persons file.

Meanwhile the statue nods to an empty street.

The weeping, like the return of the body, is secret. The Black Madonna is the soldier's widow. She weeps and nobody sees the shining path. The violin knows the silence between the notes, the longing inside its aging lacquered wood for indigo skies.

This is the song the poet sings:

My longing is for a moment of time, to distill it into words and pour the liquor into your memory to make you drunk with love.

Posted: Wed - February 8, 2006 at 01:37 PM