Gone Muddy

We've entered a land of low country and water, oceanliners sitting in the mist the ropes cut, about to drift off the pier as people with hats on, wiping tears wave before turning their backs to travel out to the country. Dirt roads gone overnight from searching white tongues rising up blue slopes, to bubbly mires of coffee mud leading to spring. Jordy said the Rabbit Man told him spring'd be here early, but that the low drift of amphibian clouds would leave us splashing in the muck for months, and even the snow flakes that'll still come will get swallowed up in the brown. It makes no sense, Jordy said, not to have a train running through this sloppy desert, as the sage gives off its wet, cool tang, and the pines over town throw a stingy raisin bucket into the mix. No sense at all as the guitars in darkening dens start to slide, lamenting the melting earth, threatening to remind everybody of their lost babies wrapped in black scarves on city blocks, smiling in a different light while these players kneel before fires, tin cans catching leaden snow droplets through the roofs. Whispered lullabies to the rusty glow giving the western horizon hope, a break above the crown of clouds clinging to the volcanoes, a place for sound to reach the galactic friends who left years ago. They play on giving you a gunny sack on the shoulder, head lowered into the black canyon where the green river is rising. She walks down there, and smells the new earth, while you keep expecting that long whistle whine you heard sometime in the past, in the high grass of some summer, when it was already over, when she'd already left. But the train isn't there, hasn't been since 1902, and clouds walk the hills and spill over the desert, silver-edged and burning, asking for more than guitars. Jordy says, Didn't you know a fiddler once? And I think of her, Kelly Joe Phelps accompanying me, green velvet hips splatted with mud drops, her fiddle up high, eyelashes licking cheekbones, too close to touch, bow pointing to a dogs lemon smile, her tongue studded with Venus, her voice hushed and talking to all of us in our dusky rooms, calling us forth to dance, without boots, in the mud. But I want to meet her alone, and I tell Jordy so. And he says, You ought to be able to, she was your girl. But I don't know this, and I never did.