Now He’s an Etching

^{For Hooker, Muddy, and Buddy}

of the sluggish, coolly vengeful way

a southern body falters. Muscles whine 

with toiling, browning teeth go tilt and splay,

then tremulous and gone. The serpentine

and slapdash landscape of his mouth is maze

for blue until the heart—so sparsely blessed,

lethargic in its fatty cloak—OKs

that surge of Tallahatchie through his chest,

and Lordy, hear that awful moan unlatch?

Behind the mic, he’s drowning in that great        

migration uniform of sharkskin patched

with prayer and dust. His cramped feet palpitate

in alligator kickers, needle-toed,

so tight he feels the thudding blood, so tight

they make it way too easy to unload

his woe. The drunken drummer misses right

on time, the speakers sputter static, but

our bluesman gravels anyhow—The moon

won’t even rise for me tonight / now what’s

a brokedown man gon’ do? That wretched croon

delights the urban wanderers, intent

on loving on this perfect underwhelm

of Negro, jinxed and catastrophic, bent

into his hurting halves. Inside the realm

of pain as pageant, woozy revelers raise

their plastic cups of fizz and watered rye

to toast the warbler of decay, whose dazed

and dwindling lyric craves its moonlit sky.