…he came out of the prairies like the fire, like the
wind. And like the wind no prairie could hold him long, hold him from the doing
he planned to be doing, planned to be making, hell, planned, just planned. So if
anybody asks you, or worse, anybody tries to tell you that his plainsong adventure
was all ad lib, was put together helter-skelter with scissors and paste (real scissors and
paste for those too young to remember such ancient ways of fitting a thing up, making
it right against mankind imperfections, or maybe were too young to remember him
except through parents, or grandparents ,or now maybe even ancient thickset,
hard of hearing angel great-grandparents)
, all mirrors and mirages like some snake oil salesman or carny barker, don’t
believe them, just don’t.
Yah, like the wind he roamed out of those okie
hills, all threadbare, all morning dust, all noon dust, all evening dust, all
dust broke, all dust finished, and like a million okies before him he lit out
for the west and more space (east, east had no appeal, had no sex appeal for him
but was like some worked- out barren mine, a place to pass by, or die in), mountains, canyons, arroyos, rios strewn every which way,
then to the flatlands past the Sierras on down to the sea, the pacific sea. And
there in the valley camps, there in the wicked miserable bracero fields, sweated, back-breaking labor
not fit for man no woman (although not as miserable as those played-out
okie fields, now bank repossessed) he got his voice. Got the rhythm of his
people not turning back (where would they go, and why, why with all hell
playing out on those dusty prairies) taking one final land’s end stand before
Jehovah himself. And he sang like some latter-day poet Whitman, and they listened,
listened to their okie bard, as he sang of their trials and tribulations, and
maybe his own.
Oh yah, sure he loved women, jesus, everybody wants
to know about that even if they can’t remember the lyrics to his plainsong, loved
every woman who gave him an eye, a shy eye, a bold eye, maybe even one-eye but
that look, or maybe just the thought of that look, got him into many a bed, wedded
bed mate (she wedded) or not. Until, until he got that okie dust feeling, that
moving on down the line feeling, or maybe she thought twice about leaving Hank,
or Jimmy, or Bill when he, seeing another eye cast his way, a shy, eye, a bold eye,
maybe even one-eye, and saved him the bother of sneaking out that third floor
back window and catching that Southern Pacific to parts unknown, yah, to parts
unknown and a fresh start, as long as he could get that okie dust out of his
throat and some pacific waters, foam-flecked, white-capped to wash him clean.
And then, well then, roaming and bumming, and bumming
and roaming (and smoking and drinking and whoring, alright) took their toll, he
lost his voice, not the physical voice but that voice that drove his plainsong,
and he took to bed, took himself back east (that east that had no sex appeal,
that was to be passed by, or was a place to die), and he collapsed in on himself,
turned to a monster of himself before the end, the feeble end. But just before
then, just that minute when that lost voice was ready to give out for good, he asked,
no he begged, no he ordered, no he commanded, in one last fit of okie hubris that under no conditions, was he
to be buried out in that throat-clogging okie wasteland. Nah, just throw his
silly (his term) ashes over some blue-green high-flying, white wave ocean and
be done with it… 
No comments:
Post a Comment