Johnny Cash scowling,
Gillian Welch strolling by
In the sultry glow of neon,
Heartbreaker bright. . .
SIDINE STREET
A poem inspired by Unbroken Line
by Joseph O’Connor
A cowboy on a business trip,
In the Shadowroads Motel,
Bought a tape by a singer whose work he didn’t know.
Lonesome as a freight train.
He bought it for its cover.
As he rode the streetcar homeward,
His eyes filled with snow.
And late that night,
Alone in his room,
He played those songs over
And the world burst alive.
In the voice of a power he thought he’d never see
Passionate and eloquent,
Longing to be free.
And he dreamed of the badlands,
The Fahrenheit high,
Johnny Cash scowling,
Gillian Welch strolling by
In the sultry glow of neon,
Heartbreaker bright,
And the heat-shimmer playing
Strange tricks with your sight.
Emmylou on the sidewalk
As the white busses stare
While out from the shopfronts
Blast vents of cold air
So that Allison Kraus
Has her hair blown a wild
But the breeze on O’Connell Street’s
Subtle and mild.
Sun Studio’s roasted.
There’s a fever in the town,
Up in Max’s Kansas City
Carlene Cash is getting down,
And the feedback of power-chords blasting out a fuse
As she stumbles to the stage singin’ ‘Hearbreaker Blues’,
Sweatin’ like a Viking, pawing at the air.
Hank Williams is deciding if he’ll dance… or if he’ll dare.
And the Scarlet Town girls
Their tattoos and their kisses
And their long, lithe limbs
In their calico dresses,
While Italian old ladies of various ages
Fanning their faces with magazine pages
On a night blue and humid and tropical-showery,
O’er the dimestores of Irishville, the dives of the Bowery.
September in a dream, but the weather still swelters
Down by Bob Dylan Boulevard and the homeless men’s shelters.
Scarlet Town in summer
Is wearing her shades,
The sun goes down but the beauty never fades.
The temperature’s roaring,
The taxi cabs screech,
All around you the soaring of Scarlet Town speech.
‘Yo Bro…Que paso?…Whatcha know…Gimme call.’
The Unbroken Line dancehall stays open to all.
It’s bluegrass, it’s newgrass, it soars and it howls,
A whole city dancing calypsos of vowels.
In Birdland. Gorgeous Wordland.
If you can’t stand the heat,
Then burn down the kitchen,
Cool your mind on the street,
Dip your hands into the music that murders the pain.
Here’s Townes Van Zandt. Here’s Tom Verlaine.
Here’s Johnny B Goode on the lead guitar.
Loretta Lynn singin’ ‘Fever’ in the punk Irish bar.
Here come Ava and Romy down Avenue A,
Steve Earle busking; Dermot Bolger rapping rhymes,
While on Broadway and Grand, with an amp in one hand,
John Prine is laughing at the Scarlet Town Times
And a beat-cop from Finglas
Is chewing the breeze
With a guy in a dress
Hanging down to his knees,
And by Dolly Parton Station,
Trading honks with a train
There’s a cat from the Bronx
Playing John Coltrane
On a saxophone gold as the ochre of the sun
As it sets on the harbor where the ships came in
From the countries of famine and murder, to be free,
Now he’s playing ‘Gentle Jesus, Just a Closer Walk With Thee.’
The cowboy heard it all.
The patois, the pizzazz,
The slangs of meshing languages, throbbing, sweet jazz,
Down in Guy Clark Park,
A Congolese Reverend Mother
Gives food among the hungry:
‘Every poor-man is my brother.’
Cowpokes in leather and wannabe stars
And smooth Puerto Ricans in honky-tonk bars,
Near the Trouble-Come-Find-Me, someone drawls: “It’s all good.”
Handsome firemen are flirting with girls from the ‘hood.
And inside the Tower of Song,
The homeless and the scholars,
Breakerswept. Waterlogged.
Eyes streaming with typographies.
In billows of numbering. Dazed by work and reading.
Through depths of pasts. The glittered, graved tiles.
Through everything written in water.
Through Atlantics of stories, by the corals of a thought.
Love poems. Tracts. Archipelagos of facts.
Melodies reminted. Love affairs sung.
The small things recorded, for no other reason
Than a fellowship with the possible; a faith-keeping.
To say: there are importances.
Other solidarities; versions.
We are not here to be advertised-to, or lied-to, or to hate.
To grub in dark spaces, afraid of ever knowing.
We are here to be better. To know more deeply what we are.
Old maps. Forgotten bindings. We too are bound.
I don’t want to be alone. I want to hear her music.
The ghosts of old security guards in the elevators at midnight,
Riding up and down the lift-shafts, swopping balladry and harmonies,
While out on Forty Second a man gazes up at the windows
And sees lights he doesn’t understand.
‘God is a library,’ John Donne wrote.
He shall gather us together. We are enfolded.
The metaphor tolling; it deepens; an echo,
Like the ohs in ‘John Donne’. Sonorous. Resonant.
God is a jukebox in East Texas.
Gutta cavat lapidem. A Latin line from Ovid
Tiled on the wall of the cheap saloon.
‘Dripping water hollows stone.’
We might yet be translated
By the everyday mercy.
By the written-on-the-wall,
And the Etta James Building
Is glintingly kissed
In her ball-gown of neon
Illumined through the mist
And the lasers go sweeping
The Scarlet Town sky
And the stargazers gaze
As the starlets stroll by.
And the songstress comes wearing her brilliant disguise:
A glittering tiara,
Zorro-mask round the eyes.
She’s a boy dressed in drag,
She’s a badass in Versace
With a painted-on smile
Like the sad Pagliacci.
Soon, soon, it will be Halloween again.
Fall-time will come
To Scarlet Town.
And on Considine Square
As the dusk brings on lights
In Victorian houses, remarkable sights
Can be seen in the park
Where a spruce shakes his hair
And a girl carves ‘I. love. U.’
Into the bark.
O say can you see by the dawn’s early light
Patsy Cline and Tammy so joyously rapping
‘Frankie and Johnny’, a-wailing the blues
And the hands of freed people brave gospels are clapping
And the rockets’ red glare, over Considine Square,
Were turned by her magic to rhymes true and rare.
Mother-city, loveland, o island of songs,
The boy stands in your windows,
As the thunderstorms roll
On a season of thirsts, of replenishing waters.
By the towers raised high by the immigrants.
And to this flag he holds,
To the music raised here,
The exile of hatreds,
The banishment of fear.
To a town built of beauty,
In its shimmer and its myth,
Where the horses of our dreaming
Were shod by Patti Smith.
Cos like Tom Waits sang,
In the whole wide world
Ain’t nothing really matters
When you love a Jersey Girl.
We are part of better angels,
Something greater, redemptive.
And when all of the rubble
Is gathered and cleared,
The jewels mined here
Might save us.
He believed it, then,
With a passion and a will.
Certain nights in Scarlet Town,
He believes it, still.
So, if your baby leaves you
And you gotta tale to tell?
I’ll see you on Sidine Street,
Where the wonders shall be well.