Cole's Guitar
It's the sound from the aid station that wakes me,
thin steel from Doc Cole's six-string,
a 4 a.m. sound of sour whiskey,
heroin and sex and dying,
that's the sound I'm hearing now,
slow as smoke from a factory in Pittsburgh,
slow as a needle in the vein,
slow as steam off the bath or a lover with only the blues to sing.
I'm hearing America now.
I'm hearing jake brakes off the Grapevine,
county highways with wheat shocks and Indian summergrass whispering,
foghorns under the Golden Gate bridge,
Ella Fitzgerald from a 4th floor window in Birmingham,
the handles of a suitcase swinging on the downbeat
of a man's footsteps walking out from a Greyhound in Sante Fe.
I'm in Wyoming. I'm in New York.
I'm leaning in to kiss a woman in the cornfields down by the river.
I'm with children drawing portraits in the sand,
old men watching fireflies the way Muhammad Ali lay on canvas and dreamed.
That's what I'm hearing,
the wind on the redwood coast,
old as the ocean and hushed by sheets of fallen snow.
Palm-mute the strings, Doc,
strum that song until I can see the breath on a bus window,
the faces of strangers in the rain,
my own hands tracing the features of every one of them,
the way ghosts might visit the ones they love,
as I am now, listening to America,
touching the cold glass.
Also see Weekend America story.
More Poetry from Brian's book... Here, Bullet
