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.