Week 7: Mississippi John Hurt

For this week, I focused on Louis Collins. My return to writing inspired by murder ballads went better than my initial attempt. Instead of trying to capture theme, I tried to capture mood. I found the relation of the blame placed on Louis Collins in the first and last verse to be an interesting inclusion in a song mourning his death, and I tried to capture the relationship between such blame and sadness.

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What sticks are the diptychs. The truism that life mirrors death, two panels, familiar, belonging, an imposed line revealing which way to look, which is which, that a lot rests on differences, that all change requires an unchanging part and some ordered pair of opposites, pivoting like a compass, making spiral circles on parallel lines and square grids.

Right: Phantom backpacks and suspenders digging into shoulders, a nudge and a pale finger in the face with a briefcase, “don’t disappoint” traversed to “you’re a disappointment.” A flinch, an apologetic hand on the back, tapping.

Left: Patted caskets, an accessed wrinkled expression, don’t cry, he was old, don’t cry, he was old enough.

Right: Stargazing under blankets, split-finger grips, staying in my room when the doorbell rings.

Left: Knocking knees on sludged about-faces, trods up aisles, uncles’ heavy colognes.

Right: Sucking it up and staying put under the quilt when one-eyed monsters scratch beneath the mattress, springs played, sonorous.

Left: A short drive to a plot in a checkerboard of plots, sprinkling shoveled clay, brusque breaths, lowering it down , mind stuck to the flight out, peeling like the loosened edge of a bed-side poster.

Right: A dropped can-of-corn fly ball, a ballpoint pen-signed failed test, weight gaining programs, forks feathering over lentil mounds and burgers eaten clean of the bun.

Left: Catering checks, and served condolences. He was good. He was great. He lived for a while. I knew him before you did.  

Right: Transplanting tomatoes, brewing bacterial fertilizer, feet poxed in Pete’s Moss, him admonishing me for running them under the hose, like a sissy.

Left: Sliding out of socks. Who will do the laundry? Cupped hands, hand splashed-faces, drying skin plucked at, like tickle-times.

It’s inevitable. Incessant. The flipping of stapled pages in a breeze. Right to left, left to right. Two steps forward, always the chance of a shove back. 

Take this. I’m in a car, three months later, alone on a run for eggs, rearview-mirror adjusted, and I reach for a CD on his seat, and he’s there with me. Set the side-views right, blink your turns, let the wheel run between your fingers as the car straightens. Speed up. Slow down. Brake.

His hair is parted, and mine is parted, I’m rolled forward in the seat, he’s hunched over. His hand plays drums on the partition cupholder, and he’s out of synch. Sulfuric smell and soil adhere to the underside of his fingernails and we breeze by auburn no trespassing signs, staked on street corners, in dead and bare oak trees, eye-level. He tilts in on my left turn, and I scoot over abruptly, hoping to avoid a shifted coffee spill. Scalding hot above my knee, where he used to spider-bite. “Come on.” There’s no response. “Come on.”

“Come on, you shit, come on.”

I dart my eyes from the road to the passenger seat and it’s empty, but I swear the headrest is still impressed, like tomato-stake holes, like corduroy patterns in heads pulled up from laps. 

The eggs shift in the back seat, and I hope they don’t fall. He never told me where to get the car serviced and cleaned.

 The voice-fading outro of a song: “You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be.”