The Meaning of Rock and Roll
“I just want to break even.” —Richard Manuel, 1976
Before the crabs-and-spaghetti feast,
before Little Jack jabbed his thumb with the diaper pin,
before the awed walk through Greenwich to the shady grove,
before Sweet said Van Morrison beat his kids and she couldn’t get behind that, no way,
before Dave said (with his Zen voice) No one’s safe as he shook out seeds,
before time fattened under the flying arches of insect paradise, tub ice rattling,
I beat Mike’s drums while his cousin whanged guitar and Dave curled
over his red bass shouting how fucking good we sounded, how motherfucking good.
We were stoned, we’d grown a righteous vintage, and as I bashed away,
a woman I’d long wanted ran her hand through curls I might have thought Botticelian
had I known then what little I know now about art or beauty, and this isn’t self-pity,
it’s a way of saying I remain helpless in the face of either, and, yes, the night
of my only drumming, that steaming night near the Cohansey—tide out, corn rattling,
mosquitoes glorying in their brief, wet heaven—that woman and I shone, we gleamed,
we breathed and swallowed and sang the pearline light of want, voices rising
like Manuel’s from the waters of Lethe Come to me now you know we’re
so alone and life is brief
and here in another tepid winter,
Persephone’s ever-fainter smell hovering in white air, irony so sickens me
I want to forgive the merest trespass and celebrate hanged Richard Manuel,
who sang with forlorn grandeur as pines whispered and the leftover coupes of the fifties
jounced down two-tracks bearing the well-intentioned fury of lovers and addled mystics
who’d never lived anything but better and better, yet whispered things
that wouldn’t go away as the radio played.
When rain comes as it comes down now,
the past rushes in, throws off her coat and demands we admire her red sweater
and the ale she found by sheer luck in the bar everyone thought had closed, but here it is—
yelled sexual roundelays, the Light Gauge String Band half in the bag, flogging the chorus
of “Sugar Hill,” Margie yelling how she’s tapped and would somebody buy a round
if she jumped in the pond and stayed for one minute, OK, two, somebody time her, so what
if it’s zero, her friends want beer and she wants to dry off in time for “Black-eyed Suzie.”
In the jabber and smoke and clawhammer boothill up-on-the-roof mojo, how many taste
the fragrance of the yes their loves-to-be mouth on a cigarette’s end or the rim of a glass?
How many taste the gall of parting in the first tongue-tip dance over a varnished pine table,
yet dandle heartbreak like a cranky toddler, cooing foo, foo, shame on you?
Each down to marrow-shiver and mouth, each flown to a sloe-eyed or knife-jawed or freckled,
red-haired, pouty here-and-now, we all lift round on round of Margie’s Free Pond Beer
till Last Call, when we stomp out chorus on chorus of “Wild Horses,”
the fiddler sawing the Light Gauge through the changes, six or seven addled cloggers
hopping like marionettes by the fire.
On the walk up the hill, we swear love beyond desire,
love genuine as immanence, immortal as beatitude, hermetic as Elohim, love new
as the new words we’ve taught ourselves to bring from far down and hold in the throat
before letting go, and when we come to the place of parting, we face into wind it hurts
to breathe, and go home. Tomorrow, we’ll worship coffee and bemoan Merleau-Ponty
and the done-for Stones, gorgeous children of the barely middle class poking and sighing
at existence and its engines.
When pines whisper and rain comes as it comes down now,
I’ve got lead in my lungs, tar in my shoes, nothing to give but the zero water I sing
as a bent scrap of tin sings, as a brush sings on plywood or rice paper or the wind-stroked
heath of childhood color, and if I had a dollar for each time I’ve hit
the high harmony on “Long Black Veil,” I’d be rich as I’ve always been, yes,
rich as Raindog, legendary drummer from way out East.
Legendary drummer from way out East.
37 Pages
$9
isbn 1-882983-80-7