Story and Song
Now going nowhere and already late,
Caught in traffic, he scanned the radio
And suddenly recalled the seventy-eight
A string band had recorded long ago,
His first record, won at a county fair
And squeaking on the magical machine
Whose stylus tracked as if downhill along
The coded grooves in which he used to stare
At moving stillness, enchanted that between
The vinyl and the diamond was a song.
And staring he saw such imaginings,
As if the very kitchen came alive.
With washboard, bottles, jug, and brassy strings,
They made a music out of daily life
From which the music may have been escape.
On a ruined porch they gathered in a ring,
The banjoist sidesaddle on the rail.
The shadow wore its mountain like a cape,
And a black path meandered to a spring
That disappeared in laurel below the trail.
The ballad's girl had gone to wash her hair
And wandered the stream too far into a grove
Of ordinary trees, from which no prayer
Could save her. By afternoon the boy in love
Had found her yellow bonnet where it lay
And followed down the unforgiving hill.
He is the hoot owl asking who and why.
She is the sound of water running away.
As long as the song is sung they wander still
Confounded in the woods, in common time.
The band by now must be disbanded, wracked
By drink or age and gone around the bend.
He'd played their song until the tenor cracked,
The banjo blurred, and words came to an end
One afternoon where the boy and girl remained
Apart, except in dreams beyond the dream.
With the signal he moved on, the music hushed.
The hard and clamorous world was little changed,
But he recalled the singing of a stream
And that it wore a diamond down to dust.
Greg will join us December 14 for a two week stint on the lariat board. There is a substantial thread already posted on "Discerning Eye" on his work. It includes Alan Sullivan's luminous essay on Greg, and my short review for Amazon of his new book, Errors In The Script. I'll be posting several substantial poems on this thread before he arrives, but let's start with this early one, which couldn't have been written by anyone who didn't hail from Nashville. He's poured the wistful music of his home town into elegant stanzas of IP, a technical achievement of the first order. For the basic measure of Nashville is ballad: "Don't come home from drinkin'/ With lovin' on your mind." To be sure, there are exceptions. One night after a furious fight, Merle Haggard told his girlfirend "Last night I started lovin' you again." She said "Merle, do you know what you've got there?" A hit was born.
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