Five days from now, Bobby Rush will step down
off a sweat-slick stage in Jackson & back—
quietly as a porcupine ducking underground—
into the name his daddy gave him. A cream Cadillac
will glide him past Krystal for one last ride
on Ellis Avenue. It’s twenty twenty-two. You’d think that—
born in thirty-three—he’s about to die.
No, they’re just changing the name of the street.
It’s you who’s shimmied up the light,
singing shut up, shut up, shut up;
you who, like every other sun-stunned
dumb front-man undone
by God’s green thirst, we must agree
to lose. For six long months you’ve been outlived
by the sycamore in front of Club Ebony;
outrun by Shane MacGowan & Keith Richards.
Clean, old, randy Bobby Rush is coming up north this month
& you are beyond studdin’. How was it
when you first felt the sum
of the evening’s constellation swinging too heavily
toward great bear? Too late? Bobby Rush & a bottle of rum:
that could be us this summer. But you are a body
in Sunflower County. The myths grow over you,
Kale-dark. Blood, says Bobby
Rush, that’s what Muddy Waters called me. So few
people in this life will ever call me bubba
& when some do
I doubt they’ll mean it. I doubt they’ll say, Bubba, jump up
here & get you some of these pecans
or spend morning in their office in a holler sweating out a poem to stump us
when in the green booths at P.K.’s
orange pills & liquor begin lifting us to a canopy
all our own. I doubt two humans will ever have so little to do again: me and
my rented orchard, you & your machete.
No one alive could disrupt the nothing we perfected.
What it was, it was not family.
More of a spiritual discipline. Waking & making some noise. Circumventing
a small fire. When you died, I drove past—
at night in Chicago—a homeless camp, a honeycombed cluster of tents
under the damp, wind-beaten overpass,
& I wondered what level of peace had been reached in there. What a gift
a single evening can become, passing
a lighter or a can of dip as traffic drifts
& bumbles around you like some
distracted Rappahannock
or Antietam.
I thought of a night in August fifteen years ago
& five hours south by train, when everyone
in the whole holler came through the propped-open storm
door of your three-room shack,
called down like lemurs out of the trees, flowed
in the citronella glow & the siren call of Bobby Womack
past the couch, through the kitchen, & out
onto that elevated, wooden back
deck that felt like a stage without
an audience, a shared privacy. Even scraggly-assed
Jacques with his pack of strays waggled down
squalling like he always was. And then comes that last
hour of all our parties: acoustic guitars,
softened voices, nightbirds & insects turning up in the mix, the crass
now whispered,
a hush we rarely heard
without resistance.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 3.
Jacob Boyd’s poems have appeared in Hawk & Handsaw, North American Review, Measure, The Fiddlehead, and Fugue. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a BA from Western Michigan University.
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