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Pat Hegnauer |
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On The Road In the late November rust, bad music filling the car, we traipse across the country, eating in truck stops, paying tolls in concrete moments, unaware our scrambled suitcases stuffed with stacks of monogrammed towels and wedding sheets won't last for the years ahead. Your hand cups my knee or pats my thigh when fatigue pushes me to isolation, settles me. When the road dirties my body you restore me in a vibrating bed for fifty cents, turn up the heat to kill the mold, and make me forget the fields edging our narrow road. A morning hamburger is enough, chips and coke, a celebration, and the serious way you listen shapes my words and sentences because you look as if you see. And yet, the pictures rotating in your private thoughts like cakes and pies circling in the silver diners are yours, and never shared. Leaving Lessons Morning shrinks pale and thin as skimmed milk, washes the ashen yard, settles chalk-dust on roots as dead leaves exhale smoke in sodden decay raked and left to scatter. You stand opening the gate whining in the thicket of lavender Morning Glories fenced and resigned to die. I dress for the evening, wear the cliché clothing that languished on our bed for days. The dull night clangs like a cracked bell, deflated moon humming pallid notes for intolerable hours. The dream lingers in lack, old intrigues limp past the roof and chimney to sigh in the unstarry black. The Black Guitar He plays guitar with a bloody heart, charisma insinuating as a car wreck, the armor of his icons, depraved antichrists, keep him from grace. He constructs nursery-rhyme dirges, low voice ignoring the dumb listeners fascinated by a chorus of murders, stiff fingers resurrecting the sorrowful frets of blues greats: Ledbetter and Mississippi John Hurt, steaming in their graves as his satanic verses vamp their classic chords, not soul, not a southern coke-bottle-dobro slid across pure chain-gang laments, or cheating woman wails, but the music and lyrics oozing from a picked wound. |