It’s a curious hunting. I just want to understand. That’s really it. Why did Smokestack Lightning singe me. Why does Hank Williams haunt me, why can’t I let go of Charley Patton or Robert Johnson’s faces? Out here scouring the land looking for the moment of maybe-knowing or beginning-to-know. Thankful for the kind world of waving strangers, that all seems like a good sign, from Cleveland to Clarksdale to Beulah, yes, I am waving to these world neighbors, who surely know better than I do, holding closer keys to the door of understanding.
“meet me in the middle of the air, if these wings should fail me, meet me with another pair,”
Oh the levee runs from Memphis to Vicksburg, all around New Orleans, where I come from, where I been, a land all full up on bridges and flood walls and rivers, full up of roiling life, and to me it all seems to fit together and likewise make no good sense,
A red fox across black blue road, near Red’s juke joint, against the sunflower river, another following, unworried and probably laughing at my amazement, the two of them playful and slow and living their own fox-lives in a Clarksdale winter, their dens warm and close and they are safe, me with the car running and Wilbur fixing to cut loose into a fit of barking, me up against the fence just watching, amazed and how unamazed the fox is,
The road carries on to a small town and all these places look like islands, islands against the levee, against crops, a whole land organized into infinity, defined by every season: winter, burning, tilling, planting, growing, weeding, growing, harvesting, tearing up, setting out, winter. The land sleeping now but ready when man is ready, when man has done the math and the science, but the land is always ready, just sleeping, waiting, not surrendered to man but not fighting it anymore, still there, providing.
The lights set out different here, the stars seem closer, the people friendlier, the whole land, every plot, every road, every cloud, perfect in it’s time and traveling on, maybe the building goes out at the state line, but the light and stars set out different here. I don’t know my own mind, my own heart, sometimes, and -
A round pen for horses so when they’re in training they can’t quit into the corner. This mind set in it’s own roundpen, tossing it’s head and kicking up dust, travellingtravellingtravelling in circles, until, I guess, eventually, it learns or quits -
All I can say is we go out walking on the roads, driving on the highways, searching. Searching. Looking for them ghosts that used to travel highway 61, wrote and sang about it, before It as new highway 61 and old highway 61.
“She calls it rumbling, I calls it falling down.”
Seen some death out here, seen some strange things, but Lewis Nordan knew when he said “the delta is full up on death,” but I think it’s more than that - the delta is full up, full up near about everything.
Maybe it’s just in the seeing-is-believing but that doesn’t make it science, but - seems like every other cemetery out here has a new grave, or two. Seems death is just outside the circle now and waiting, setting boar-hog traps and waiting, you could walk in - plastic flowers heaped into the woods, new flowers green and loving, crosses set, too sad to talk about too much, the whole world gradient into the ground of who and how soon and too young and - we have always been so lucky - we are still here now -
