Backwater Blues, 1927
A man’s life isn’t worth mule piss
in those levee and lumber camps,
skillet-black bears, panthers,
cottonmouths as fat as a dead man’s arm,
and the nearest town, doctor, two days
through cistern-dark cypress swamp,
the kind of heat that guarantees demons,
haints, ill portents. The first afternoon,
Skip remembers the riverbank caving,
how the teamster followed his two oxen
off the bluff, reigns in hand, gee-ing
and whoa-ing all eighty feet down
into the milk-brown Tallahatchie.
The Delta can make folks just disappear.
Out there, night sneaks up like a sneeze,
one minute a pink skirt seam lights the west,
the next all creation turns black as molasses.
Skip savors this time, the owl-rise, foxfire end
of day, when this world butts against the next
and the vanished come back, dead voices
somewhere between a yodel and a moan,
the overture for His lonely afterward.
A shotgun fires. Pretty soon, half the camp
will be playing faro, dozens, dice. If God walks
among them, Skip hopes He packs a knife.
