George Kalamaras

Buddy Guy’s Blues and the Discovery of Feedback

                  The hem of a woman’s skirt brushes an instant

against the strings of your guitar,

Buddy, propped on stage in the smoky break

between sets, yet live with wire.  Her note

hovers like a spaceship, knocks sound

resonance from the jukebox song out of itself, pouring

the buzz out as a bumble bee somewhere in the space

between idle axe and 45 wax.  You look up

across the room from your scotch, feel cubes

begin to loosen their hold, the dark amber

going more gold.  Some small bar in some

southern town in some still smoke.  This is not Chicago,

you realize, but your most moist

and intimate vowel.  You turn toward the feed

that rises from your amp, and a humming-

bird in your right ear draws perfect water in secret

pools from your tubes.  Photons melt and blur

your axe back to gardens of womb worlds.

The sacred fire to spark.  A fleck of jaguar

pacing combs the underbrush, caught an instant

as blood?  You’ve never before heard

such sound except in dream, prowling leaves

brushing tails across your path, warped

and bent with brambles.  You’ve never heard

a thorny rose in your mother’s step,

nor in the sexual drift of a stranger’s

hips which flair her skirt across an edge

of stage as she fills the silence between sets

with a fluid stroll for more.

A thread from this sudden walking

is not Louisiana but a hold

in your heart like a suture

of milk or hovering vowel, fierce

and full of mending.  This is it,

you think, the mantric bees, eternal hum,

hairline crack in the cosmic egg

that splits the night with reversed lightning.

The placement of food into mouths

of the dead.  Garlic cloves in left ears

of the deaf.  Well water from the camel’s hump

in pans beneath your mother’s bed.  Your skin dampens

with night-sweats, though you have never been more

awake leaning as you are against some bar

in some small town in some still smoking

sound that burns your brain like amber

ice going down to dissolve along the round length

of a candle.  The hum of the world,

you think, and all from the hem

of a woman’s skirt.  You want to hold

that buzz, become the moment in salt

just before it dissolves to sound,

moving your hammer after the break

back and forth against the amp in the attitude

of a watery weed that lifts the first song

in the second set out of itself into solution.

Your axe bends the blues back, Buddy,

past Delta damp to the world before.

Something not of this planet hovers

in perfect swallow.  Your winging riffs mouth vowels

that screech, then sleep, secret mantras

that spell dark Louisiana smoke to galactic gold,

to liquid bees, to first and final speech.

So Many Roads, is a blues poetry column by George Kalamaras. Award-winning poet George Kalamaras was born on the South Side of Chicago and grew up listening to the blues--beginning with Ray Charles...(read bio)