George Kalamaras

Queen of the Blues

                                     —for Koko Taylor

music like a god

the bump and grunt

why break the blues across

the blue horizon of the sky?

why break the crush of black bread?

bee intestines strung from a Memphis farm to Chicago

voice fuller than breasts

breasts fuller than two black-hole moons

a man is writing his life

trying desperately not to objectify his inside black

the way a teacher bites an apple and makes of it a room

the way I dreamed Saturn-burn turn in my wrist with each note you sang

let me call you, Cora, by your Christian name

let me crawl your last name, Walton, vast across my chest

you married “Pops” Taylor who drove a truck

and brought you in ’54 all the way to Chicago

hear, now, the scrape of the curved horn

of the giant sable antelope of Angola

lusted after for a hundred years

this elusive beast among the chokeberry and the scutch

hear the jungle-scut of ivory and enormous roaring beasts

and how all the lame and dead

lepers I met in India, lunatics in Delhi, all who bled

less fed than your voice filling that part of my now-open heart

Koko, live at Sam’s, Fort Collins, 1982—me, not wanting to dance

but drink, instead, your sinew strut, your every spacious swerve

how I fell in love with the coffee-stain of your voice

the Rocky Mountains blurred with the brazen belt of all the blue you said

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)