A Last Drink For Jimmy
I was surfing music websites
when I read that Jimmy Lafave had died.
I watched his last performance on youtube.
I watched as he moved
his once solid frame
carefully about the stage, as though
it was something borrowed that
he intended to return
with as few knocks and bumps as possible.
His voice though, unchanged,
rich with light and shadow,
thick with the texture of weathered oak.
Sometime later, under the flyover,
I raised a glass
to the man and his music.
The earth was packed hard and littered
with empty bottles, crumpled
cigarette packets.
An old mattress ripped and torn,
spilt its stuffing onto the ground.
I watched the sun sink behind
the steel and glass office blocks.
The shadows deepened
and bled across the earth like
pools of spreading ink,
gusts of wind blew old newspapers and the traffic
thundered overhead.
Jimmy sang about this, the lost and discarded,
the stuff that cities
have no further use for,
the sadness and madness of it all.
I saw him perform just the once in
the early seventies.
He came on stage and, without preamble,
launched straight into
Dylan’s ‘’Just Like A Woman.’’
That broken voice that held desert sunsets
and dark bars; loss and loneliness
that ran soul deep.Guitar riffs that left
your heart scorched and your throat
gritty with Texas sand.
I remember how, the following day,
I could hardly bring myself to speak.
There didn’t seem to be
anything left to say,
nor, the language left,
with which to say it.
