“Just when it seemed Libby’s star could rise
no higher, she was introduced to a slim, moody,
17 year old North Carolinian aviator named
Zachary Smith Reynolds…He threatened to
commit suicide if she would not marry him
instantly.” – Milt Machlin (Libby Holman’s
biographer)

A journey’s end from Winston-Salem.
He is moneybags, a Midas of Easy St,
his tobacco riches have a rotund figure,
not the chewing substance, nor that snuffled
through the antennas of the schnozzle.
In Greek calends they’d have made panatelas
out of it, but this is for puffing
in hop-o’-my-thumb funnels
called Camel Cigarettes.

His daddy has a small-built factory,
ravishing Southern Virginia
on the Rock Spring Plantation
in the silhouette of No Business Mountain
but they, rooted by the frills
of a rippling boathouse,
held renditions on the Aeolian organ,
pas de deux in flower garden get-togethers,
sequinned balls and pockets stuffed
with five and ten dollar reserves.

In Greenwich Village he heard Libby warble,
a flame was lit
by the pyres of her smoky voice.

FROM THE LIBBY HOLEMAN POEMS

Christopher Barnes lives and writes in Newcastle, England.  His first collection of poems LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh EH3 6HN.  He appears in the film, How Gay Are Your Genes, which showed at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University.