Dockery Plantation Blues

In a Mississippi graveyard,
as the midnight hour crawls,
sits a young boy and his guitar
wailing tunes at the moon.
He prays his fingers faster
as they dance across the frets,
weeping at his inability
to speak in tongues from the strings.

He is lost in a fugue
of chaotic chords and strumming,
as the Delta Blues pour muddy,
like the churning brown river,
from the cheap wooden box.
When a black man comes upon him
and watches from the road
outside the cemetery walls.

The giant negro comments
on the “po’boys” basic tuning,
his voice like rotting timber
making the moonlight splinter.
Little Robert Dusty,
his face screwed up in concentration,
stops playing for a second
and hands the guitar to the shadow.

He twists,
he turns,
he licks
his lips.
He plucks
a string,
drawing
warm molasses.

The boy feels a shift,
as if something is released,
taking back the guitar
he strikes across the strings.
When he looks up again
there is no stranger,
just wind blown footsteps
swirling at the crossroads.

Robert Johnson in a juke joint
choking the Blues from a guitar
as the devil takes a jar
and drops a soul into it.
Legba smiles, seals the lid
and whistles, out of tune,
to the sweet sound of bedlam
soughing on the wind.

He chuckles
at the applause
of the people
in the dance hall
and checks out
of the motel
on Main Street
in Clarksdale.