In A Cypress Brake

Little Mama Steele rents out the dock
for catfishing, the juke joint all gone
to bait shop & lunch counter, rickety

as a rich man’s speech to God,
the swamp air peeling off the paint,
until the wood aches right out loud,

with brief brittle moans about bones
and the rain and low snakey clouds.
The music’s still there somewhere,

so good even Satan gave thanks,
so sad you carried your own grave
home, yes, like the luggage it is.

She still gets tourists, cathedral
shadows on their faces, asking her
if there ever truly was a place

smack where they sat, waiting
on crawfish pie and ghost stories.
“The angel Gabriel and Mr. Scratch,

did you ever really see them here?”
“Yes, at that red table over there.
They’d reminisce on the old days

when they were pals, before man,
before chasing everyone like hounds
to escape the middleground one way

or another,” Little Mama teased.
Everyone stops talking for Blind Bob,
and a harmonica solo that could saw

through battleship walls if he chose
to riff an iron ripping frequency.
Bob plays the tourists for tips, but

there was a mission, too. It’s all true.
“The people left. Got city jobs,”
he’d say, to explain the now away,

“And, course, back then, wasn’t good
to be yourself in these parts. Still,
heroes walked here, in the only joy

outside Church or bed. Happiness,
you know, could get you killed.”
On right nights, alone, in delta dark

sliding down wet and thick as jam,
she treats herself to British gin
belts one out again, big blues ray,

unleashing a voice they claimed
could even keep the cops at bay,
(until change had to come, that is).

Her eyes latch onto the bye and bye,
a gentlemen glows in the audience,
panama hat, pearl-handled pistol,

waving her to his red table. Who
enchanted who? Hard to say back then,
when bullfrogs took the base line

and a wild marsh wind filled in.
Just one generation left still sees
people they know hanging from trees

in the horror corners of fitful sleep, now
all colored by the same bog fog greys
of TV light, as tourists pull into motels

on Highway 61, where clerks whisper
Pinetop, Willie, Sunnyland,
Muddy slept here.