Poem for Monday

Leadbelly
By E. M. Schorb

   for the musical ghost of Blind Lemon Jefferson

   Leadbelly, grim with your Cajun accordian,
with your harmonica blues, with your knife
   flicking down the twelve strings of your guitar
--the Rock Island Line was a mighty good road--
   bowing, scraping, white-suited trainman. . .
made your pride sick, but you sang,
   fast, strong, quiet, like a driven
demon, like you had to get it out
   before a razor dumped your guts
on a blood-mud taphouse floor,
   or some drunk crazy rednecks
nailed you up like Christ, in a dangerous world
   for anybody but most America for a black
poet of low-down places and sky-high loves.

   Leadbelly, thirty years hard time murder,
six and a half, sang your way out, ten more, intent,
   then Alan Lomax and his bro, John, folklorists--
makes you laugh inside at night--white boys,
   playing--but they get you out again and in
the Library of Congress, that grinding
   voice part now of something big, like
storm darkness, like that lifething,
   love, always beyond somewhere or
crying deep inside, in a dark place,
   yeah, big like music, big like that gal you
call Irene! How many Irenes, you think?

   Even the Lomax bros, even them white boys,
they know Irene--you driving them through
   New York traffic, them folkloring in back and you
being their folkloring black chauffeur.
   You drink sharp liquor in Harlem, play
with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie
   McGhee, the Headline Singers--radio too,
Hollywood and Three Songs by Leadbelly,
   a French tour. . . . You show 'em your razor
stretch marks, your shotpitted pot.
   Good night Irene I'll see you in my dreams. . .
all that good hot mean hard American life
   and Lou Gehrig's amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
It's The Midnight Special! Fade me, Death!

--------

Am still in moderate-to-high squee mode, partly because my good friend in London just told me that a friend and co-worker of hers is co-adapting a play with Alan Rickman. She ordered me not to salivate. I can't help it. Certain people suggested that it was just as well that it was not me co-adapting a play or anything else with Alan Rickman, as I would surely salivate on him, and then he would scold me, and that would only make matters very, very much worse. *crumples into whimpering heap*

LiveJournal appears to be eating my comments. I have not gotten a single one since early this morning except on a handful of comments I left in other people's journals. I will eventually find the ones here, I suppose, so long as they are on fairly recent posts, but I imagine that if you wrote back to anything I said in your journal, odds are good I may not see it, so please don't be mad!

I wanted to be Alma-Tadema's "The Favorite Poet" like from whom I gacked this quiz, like in the icon I am using right now, which I have had for ages, and I thought I was slanting my answers that way, but I am:


Why, you saucy thing you! You are incredibly sensual, amorous, and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. You appreciate your own body, and that of those around you, when you are have the opportunity! You also very likely love all the pleasures of life, in the form of sumptuous fabrics, textures, foods, and even really moving ideas and conversations. As long as you are responsible, Hedonism rocks!

You are Nymphs and Satyr by Bouguereau.
Which Pre~Raphaelite Painting Are You?
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The washing machine is working but I can't tell if it's spinning right; clothes still seem to be awfully damp coming out. Am hoping this is a one-time thing and perhaps I overloaded the sweats. Am planning to make sacrifices to the laundry gods and try much smaller loads next time.


Here is Aragorn running on his wheel, with a mouthful of fluff with which to build a nest. Where he thinks he's racing to put the fluff, I couldn't guess -- Minas Tirith? Rivendell? Boromir's cage?


Boromir is much calmer and more methodical, chewing apart toilet paper tubes (Aragorn always pees on his tubes before he starts chewing on them, which seems odd to me, but then I am not a Ranger gerbil). Rather than spending as much time on the wheel, Boromir builds enormous fluffy nests -- much more impressive than Aragorn's -- as if he were dreaming of building for two...