Sometime after
midnight, in a powder blue
Bel Air, top
down, roaring down Route 522,
we are
inconspicuous as the soft sound
of insects
hitting the window like rain,
Patsy’s voice,
loud over her guitar, singing
Johnny Cash’s
“Folsom Prison Blues,”
I guess that I
was sort of star-struck.
When we cross
the Tennessee border,
she says to
pull over so she can walk
in the blue
grass and says she thinks
heaven is blue
or lavender, but not white.
Somewhere, she
says, in some lounge,
people are
listening to her music
on some jukebox
and in her next life
she wants to be
the dog with her ear
to the
victrola. She says someday
people will be
saying they are
the
reincarnation of her. I drive beside
her and turn up
the radio. I am far away
from the coal
fields, the company
store, washing
other people’s clothes,
and it has been
a long while now since
I picked
strawberries with migrant workers.
You get to this
point where you know
you could win a
blue ribbon with the one
right in your
hand, and some might just spit
on it, but you
put the perfect fruit in the basket
with the rest
of them, mostly because
the fruit is
not yours to own. Right now,
I am so far
away from my first twenty dollar
guitar and
garden raising and canning
cucumber, corn,
pickles, preserves,
tomatoes and
sauerkraut and eating
what is raised
in the fields that I don’t
notice the
stars. Patsy sees them first.
pointing the
guitar neck up, shooting down
the stars,
trying to sing Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock,”
but it sounds
like she’s on 78, doing a movie
in her head far
away from drugstore dreaming.
This is not
Butcher Hollow or any other one
of those
“Hollers” people are screaming
inside shafts
to get out of. We are not just
cut out for
state fair blue ribbon competitions.
We are not
making babies or picking apples,
today. We are
just two honky-tonks you can’t
stop, like the
direction of a frog once it has leaped.
I can tell her
now that we are alone that the twins,
Patsy, her
namesake, and Peggy have discovered
the toilet and
putting things in and that they got
some honky-tonk
in them. I know it’s not crazy
to feel this
way for another woman, both of us
have men at
home. It’s just a swirl in my sternum,
happy driving
her wherever she likes under the sky,
knowing I owe
my soul to no one. Retta,
she says, We’re going to reinvent the jukebox.
for Georgia O'Keefe
The
confirmation of flames,
volcanic light
of labia,
or tongue
flickering,
or field after
harvest,
or something
terrible,
descending or
ascending,
ending or
unending,
unbosoming
without water.
A naked woman
waits
a camellia in
full flame,
unbranched,
without stem,
erect petals,
hot coals
at her feet,
flushed with desire,
self after self
opening
to someone
standing in the middle
of an empty,
unbracketed room,
extending
herself to an uncertain
morning,
unreachable horizon,
or not reaching
but opening,
or opened to
its fullest
extent. This,
the center
of being, brush
collecting reds,
yellows,
lavenders and flesh
tones that make
the arms nervous,
the legs open,
slightly, lifted
toward or away
from the origin,
transcendence,
a salty howl,
brambles in
scorched red,
hollow orange,
mellow gold,
lavender
extinction, hissing
cool as
sherbet, white
flames still
burning
from last
night's dream.
against her
tongue,
but the tea
cups at the state
fair left her
addicted
to the wheel:
hands grasp and
slip
to turn the
table,
duplicate
motions,
the buzz of the
spin,
except it is
footwork,
toe to heel
toward
the center of
stone
until the
bottoms
of her feet
burned,
blistered, then
callused.
In a raw
studio,
she spins
teacups,
vessels thin as
skin,
with two
handles,
inscribes a
single word
inside each
one.
She remembers
spoons
of red elixir,
her Nani
saying, Clay will cure
your ills, but blackened
red dirt, with some small
limas on the side, will satisfy.
She wedges with
her Nani’s
rolling pin,
knowing the smallest
bubble can
cause an explosion.
She wants
something empirical,
but throwing
pots is designed
to fail, the
art of defects.
She shapes with
paint scrapers,
sponges,
spoons, widths of wire,
a whittled
wooden trimmer,
a rib bone or
rock will smooth
clay to
leather. Raw materials
give texture,
decoration:
the jewelry of
raku.
Mopping water
in and out
of the vessel,
she spins
the wheel,
slips the body
through her
hands.
Wind blows
newspaper
up from the
highway,
swirling her in
dust.
She caresses
the body
on foam to dry
before firing,
weighs grams of
copper
and cobalt
carbonate,
iron oxide,
sieves the lumps,
mixes the
glaze, tastes
sensations of
red.
She works
barefoot in water,
in a dark,
flooded, cement-
floored studio.
Colors combust
in sawdust,
in a trash can
saggar.
The black body
synthesizes
with fire. Its
luster reflects
light. She
knows, someday,
someone will
buy her tea sets,
store them in
wooden crates.
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Last updated: May 1, 2001.