Spread My Raincoat Down

                              for David “Honeyboy” Edwards,

June 28, 1915 – August 29, 2011

Sweet as, well, the humbling work of bees

making the moon tonight mad as some magnificent mouth.

It sits there in its white socket of sky

as if smooth bone-light poured loose.

Bone-light in Chicago, in the fractured maw

of Shaw, Mississippi, which you left

at fourteen to travel with Big Joe Williams,

but which never left you

in Salida, in hopping freight to Chicago

or Saint Louis or the bus to Greenwood, Mississippi.

You were there, Honeyboy, in ’38 the night

Robert Johnson drank the poisoned whiskey.

Three days later, pumping his chest,

pumping your fist at the sky.

And that first recording of you in ’42,

the way you make all things

rain inside us all

when you sing “Spread My Raincoat Down.”

The way light is dust,

and dark, darker still.

And the mumbling mouths of bees

work worms loose from your chords

into something so sweet

we can’t call it David or Edwards

or anything lamed with a name.

The way we are all things

rather than a this or a that.

The way dust is light,

and bone-light, whiter

yet darker still.

To hear Honeyboy's recording of "Spread My Raincoat Down" from 1942, click on the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fATSQa-0iII