“Fresh Air Tavern, Seattle, 1973″ first appeared in Quiet Diamonds.
It was blues Valhalla, offspring of every juke joint,
barrelhouse and Saturday night gin shack
spawned by Southern field and lumber camp.
Couch a relic burned by countless cigarettes;
the bouncer, five-foot-four, yanked from a motorcycle gang.
On any given weekend you’d hear Black,
you’d feel your tongue smoke like griddle cakes
when Sugarcane Harris wove his demonic bow
or Muddy Waters scorched with Hound Dog Taylor
and the House Rockers, the electric slide
a sound to take your head off and hand it back
forever altered, down payment still owed.
But if you really craved the roots, ached for soil
that steamed under an unforgiving sun, you caught
Lightnin’ Hopkins, asked Mance Lipscomb
to play “Goin’ Down Slow” one more time.
That era, when you could ramble from the Fresh Air
to the Encore Ballroom to hear Taj Mahal
and four Afro-haired kids on tuba play the sweet,
syncopated marrow of cakewalk funky,
or slip into a Pike Street hole-in-the-wall,
where Reverend Gary Davis—the Rev!—turned people
inside out with “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,”
engraved itself deep down, a scrimshaw on my bones.
They’re vanished now, those old blues haunts.
Shadows a dark, humid earth that spills
from my guitar. Lost countries of the mind
shrouded in dust, in chords no longer played.
Gone like chain gang refugees from Georgia,
from Angola, Huntsville, Parchman Farm.
The boss man coiling and snapping his whip.
That tight-lipped shotgun rider.