Delta Dispatch #5

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 - 

Delta Dispatch #4

A bottle tree to catch the ghosts. They rise and rise and rise, bursting in the sun caught in the blue, sparkling into dust to scatter and gather again, rising into the future night, below the stars,

-— 

Timing is everything, that’s all there is. Imagine living in the animal world, in the woods, squirrels knowing to go because of daylight, sensing deep in their small bodies the shift in season, it slowly moving on with the whirl of the planet, of the curling in the constellations, these creatures in their nests, knowing. 

There are lights from old highway 61 from the window where I am living, shining bright stars. In the deep delta night, the cold fits it, the dark fits it, it feels the same as a season shifting smally and this old sorry body feeling it - in the field in the gloaming the first bright stars out in the blue grey purple of a sunsetting. 

Huntsville has caves beneath it, and Florida has so much limestone, I feel like my heart is what exactly keeps me up, when it catches it gets caught and grows to see the whole world happily - tears ever brimming at the water table, there just waiting to be needed or wanted, for all the beauty in the world; if-this-isn’t-nice-i-don’t-know-what-is, this friendly-friendly world, oh.  

Yesterday’s sunset a pastel dream - tiresome to say pastel, to say dream, the land out here I  can’t compare to another; hard to fit shoes on a kicking horse, a  —- speechless, wordless in this version of the world, a hundred poems to celebrate strange sincere love like I haven’t known it before, or known it in so long. 

Even in painting and photographing now it seems like a tiresome task of defining instead of celebrating; the photographs lack anything technically good or artistically good, or whatever - but I am there leaning into the mud and the cold and the sunrise and sunset because I want to witness it, love it, be enveloped in it, because - it hurts in the way good love can be so powerful it is hurtful with goodness and joy and hope. It seems right to hunt the trail, maybe the answer is hidden, holed up, out in the bayou. The thing is, right or wrong, this land hits like an icepick shattering into disassociation, into lost empathy, hidden figures and feelings of each name, hits into it seeping same as cold fingers warming up against the fire, awakening and hard to define, but it hits, it hits, it hits, like the blues - maybe these are soul plug-and-socket finding one another, blues and the delta, heart and soul, heading down the road how you’re supposed, on the way to the meant-to-be. 

Delta Dispatch #1

New eyes are all there is, the thing is in possessing them. When every day is wholly beautiful, in both the starting and stopping of it, takes some luck and takes a good set of eyes to see it. 

Here it all is, this is all the fruition, working towards no fruit, just life done like my own garden, seeds sowed, transplants, going-to-the-store, planting with hope and dumb luck. When those Georgia collards unfurl they are beautiful, more beautiful than most things I could think to compare them to - frost passes over them and they are still green, untouched, reaching skyward thankful for the sun and - they don’t need anything. Sun, water, some good dirt, they go on and on, into the spring they grow glad. No flower, no fruit, just carrying on. 

Then it is all there; life is all there, those paintings dreaming of the delta, all that writing and singing, all of those blues, 

Washington Phillips on the road today off of the 61 highway, singing with his angels and cloud-guitar says

“take your burden to the Lord, leave it there … your soul is almost sinking in despair, He can save, He can heal, oh leave it there; if you can trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out - God in heaven will answer prayer, He will make a way for you, He will guide you safely through, take your burden to the Lord and leave it there. Now if your useful days are gone and old age is stealing on, and your body sinks beneath the weight of care, Jesus will never leave you then, He’ll go with you through the end,” 

The greens get cut leaf by leaf and boiled down and they keep growing. Folks used to eat poke sallet for poverty, and here I am letting those greens grow wild and growing poke for it’s pretty colors, too. The greens grow bigger than my old head, hands, shoulders, grow and grow, taking up their garden box, stretching happily every morning further towards the sun and, the credit is all theirs, I just carried them home, ancestors growing flowers for their beauty, greens for their produce, an old old old bachelor uncle, so old I don’t know his name, potted flowers in coffee cans on the road to his house, and here I am, growing collards because they are  just so happy. 

The all in all is, I am glad and I am grateful, in the strange hibernation of 2020; the very highs of the beginning of the year out barefoot on the coast in the old oaks and beneath it’s loving sky, to the sleeping that began in the summer, some days more awake than others, moving through but lazy; been hesitant all year to call it lazy, but that is it’s name. Once I am in the studio it is always good, when the work begins, like writing or singing or doing the thing in your ultimate soul; once you are living in the doing it feels awful good. Life drops away and the task at hand brings the mind to it’s heavenly cloud, all those burdens left back on earth or with God but they are left there. The eyes got old and tired, burdened, body burdened to where I hate the shape of my own shadow, forget mirrors, and silly burdens, carpenter bee burdens, daily road and old soy field burdens, old could have should have burdens, and then - 

The clouds break; I am writing this to ensure that they break; they broke on my sleeping eyes, sleeping heart, sleeping mind, sleeping soul is what it is. Watching everything kudzu up with darkness and fear and anger, kudzu all over, not flowering and kind, just crawling and mean.

The clouds break, even in the cold of the delta land, I can type delta land here on it, the clouds broken over it in sunshine and I can’t be barefoot out here for the cold but I can still be glad and new-eyed and 

On the trip here I worried it was too easy, each good trip marked and marred with a good toil or toll to earn the magic ahead, but I will take the cold, I will take the toll of self-appointed, self-carried burden, the task of shaking it off and moving forward into the light of the year and of life, here in the strange magic of the delta, that is the fee - 

I can see the changes in myself over the past year, enacted I believe because of fear, 

Other changes from the same laziness of self I don’t fight; so many years of self-hatred to the awakening of self love, last spring plunged back into the darkness of self hate seeping into interactions with other folks; that if the way forward is running it will eventually be running, but now it is walking and not changing the things I should change because eventually it will be changing. Too much of both, then both at once, left me here at the crossroads and

Here I am at those crossroads, or that night church yard among the gravestones,

Among the sleeping snakes and bright fake flowers, so many the churches with new graves piled in red orange dirt, and

Miring myself in myself is never anything; I have so much, I am so grateful, even the troubles of 2020 were not the troubles of sickness or death for the people that I love and I am thankful - reasoning and puzzling self-image is so small compared to the grandness of life, for the greatness of new eyes in a good world. 

And I don’t know it seems like if a person gets risen up we all get risen up together, hand to hand, or smile to smile and 

Lord help my hard luck soul / sorry old soul /