That night in Prague Mozart drank too much beer and sang the song he’d written to a brassy Bedouin. Napoleon shouted from the card table “Shut that idiot up—he can’t sing a lick.” “He can’t write either, “ Suzette added. Shoving Mozart into a chair, Jean Pierre leaped on the bar with his [...]

for Sinéad O’Connor     From a barren rotunda he’s the emperor of a kingdom named Contre-Femme: Il Duce bans bare knees from St Peter’s & he’s never been a match for a pagan roundel written after a woman’s freckled arms: his liturgy has it in for the pink & he blanches at the [...]

Highway 61, there is nothing So beautiful as you in August, the way You break out of Third Street, In the Memphis sun, and make due South for that ghost-rich delta, Flat as a fret board, road signs Pointing toward places We’ve only heard about in the static Of songs from the 1920s and [...]

West of the hill country, east of the delta,
Halfway between Holcomb and Greenwood,
High above the cotton farms and grain fields
That hem the edge of Highway 4,
Above Avalon, towering over Teoc,
Lost in the gas-lamp
Glare of a late August sun,
We search these woods for Mississippi John Hurt.

            she is stealing Sunday’s sacred octaves and subverting their pious trajectories             with elliptical detours and she sets a ménage between The Salton Sea             and a Stiletto Co-op and cultivating hybrid fruit in the soil   [...]

… But we turn away, and talk of what
we have never seen. There, wind’s making music
with the brittle branches of the ash tree, its lyric
goes like this,…

I saw Orff’s Carmina Burana performed live once, rapt
from what would have otherwise been an uncomfortable pew
in an upstate Methodist church. Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi: O
Fortuna shook my ribs and everything beneath.

For the last half of the movie,
my saloon will burn on Main Street

my story heaped upon it
with everyone’s before me

…borrowed
from Piazzolla’s masterpiece, amazed
the notes could bathe a honeymoon in sorrow.

Night blares on, cabs fill with sorry lovers
spilling confessions like exorcisms
like Nina Simone getting out a blues tune:
I know the awful ache.
Her gritty tones rise, reaching out into dead air.
Her voice curls like a lover’s back.