Dylan's Fifth

In this black-edged corner, this May of human killings,
I feel the cold sweat of cheap beer on long necks
sliding through tired palms, weak fingers like wet sticks
hanging from rain-drenched branches, helpless to the rest
of the world, a trembling brain between deaf ears.

Dylan sings the same songs I missed on Bleeker Street,
versions through a voice bubbling in scalding water, still
the message is clear, but in those days we were going
places, now we fight just to follow the words and tongues
spitting a language we really cannot hear, don't want to.

When I heard him sing the first time I was only twenty-one,
still young enough to be pulled in by innocence, old enough
to know this was something special, something needed.

Taking in the fifth concert thirty years later I want to make
ignorance talk again, to make a basement full of blue call
the spirits from twisted joints the way plaster walls reveal
the faces of people we know, it feels good to be listening
to what really blows in the wind when a hard rain falls.

No one lives in his house on that rocky hill in Woodstock,
only music, but I sometimes wish I had gone to visit when
I lived close enough to do so, mistakes are made to be
remembered, to defuse our moments, so we can grow
older than the mistakes, change, turn into bones, become
memories, sow seeds, cast thunderbolts at people we say
we love, then make our peace with God, all before we die.

For my children the dark corner, like some spiritual
museum, a history of me, the packed house, the drifting
smoke, warm beer, love minus zero with no limit and
that empty feeling I left on Bleeker Street in 1969, I
forget the hollow sound of the bad ones, feel the good
ones, hearing every grain of sand hum inside, sharing,
my daughter, my son, and I taking in the fourth and fifth
concerts, Dylan, their faces looking back like mine.

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