Jimmie Wayne
I come here tonight from my grandfather’s side.
I’m with him again, you see.
He says he likes my poem about
the ghost in the corn and me,
but not so much my bad dream poem-
he can’t figure what it means.
The poems don’t explain; they report, I say.
No explanation was given
me when I dreamed it, but dreaming it meant
I had to write it since
I rarely dreamed-- I rarely slept.
I’ve heard the rumored nonsense
that I never slept, that I hunkered all night
on my haunches smoking the one
in my hand while a second burned in the tray
and cup after cup stained
coffee rings on scattered letters
and books. Some people say
I drank while I should have been sleeping,
but Ed can tell you the truth:
I slept in my station wagon. Once when
McClanahan saw me there
asleep in my parked white wagon,
windows down for air,
he reached inside to shake me awake
and tell me to go to bed,
but all asleep, I nuzzled his hand
like a lover’s hand. He said
he never again tried to wake me.
I’ve become the stories
about me, you see. That’s as it should be.
Stories are nothing but history
with a dollop of intrigue added, a pinch
of horror, some murders and a scoop
of unrequited devotion.
Both fact and fable go into the soup.
I came to Hindman in ‘seventy-nine
through a storm of lightning and thunder--
that’s fact. But some say I
rode a bolt of lightning in through a window,
flashing out of black night like a hook
on a car door handle.
You who were here that night, and you here
tonight are like courting couples
falling in love with words; Hindman
is your Lover’s Leap;
and I came to tell you the price you’ll pay
for the company you keep.
I kept company with the past,
my past, gone
the way of family farms in Leicester,
North Carolina. When
I saw that old way of life was leaving,
I wrote it down. I broke
new ground with old words.
My plowing pen back then turned rows
on yellow legal pads, through fields
my grandfather had tilled.
We write to save what we love.
I thought if I could fill
the ache left by his dying, by small farms
disappearing, by time
sweeping past like a tractor-trailer,
with my new crop of stories and dreams--
then maybe I could save myself
from losing my native self
that shared with children and foxhounds a way
of sizing up how a situation smells.
When America came to the mountains
and named us “Briers”, I smelled
a slick way of taking away who we were,
so I helped Brier tell
his own story and sing his ballads of an evening.
I brought Brier back
from a suburb north of himself. But somewhere
I lost track
of who was Brier and who was Jimmie.
I stopped being able to say
“I”. We are all the sums of ourselves
and I had become Jim Wayne.
You see, I had written myself
into a myth of myself.
Miller’s voice became Brier’s voice,
became a suitcase someone else
(Click on Photograph)
would live a life out of. Folks
who’d never met me, knew me;
quoted me; wrote papers on what I meant
by what I’d said. Writers must be
born again with each new book
and I learned to accept
I’d have no say in who I became.
It’s like I said
the summer I died of my cigarettes,
“Lo, these years I’ve embraced
my lover and now she’s embracing me back.”
I took the chance you take
when you get addicted to words. Like
floodwaters rising in the night,
your thoughts will take you over, become
your deadly lover. You’ll die
in their twining arms and not even know
you’ve died, or if you know,
won’t care. Better than bourbon whiskey
is the sweet, slow glow
of word intoxication.
Gets so you don’t know
what’s real from what’s in your head
but you love the made-up, most.
When the writing’s hot, it’s like a gift
you probably don’t deserve,
but Lord have mercy- you want it.
You plead with the universe
to spin you around to this fertile place
once more, just once, because
the truth that drives you to drink is that
you can’t recall where it was.
All you can do is retrace the steps
that got you there before -
you call it your process. Dana,
when you started this poem
you kept in your car a tape of me talking
to listen to while driving,
to get my voice in your head, but
I turned on you, didn’t I?
Halfway between home and school,
you had the notion that I
was alive inside your radio,
talking in 2005,
almost a decade after I died.
I was. I am. The heart
of a writer can’t die. Like radio waves
to a distant star
its beat goes on-- sounding, and echoing
back as alive as the body
once was. Turn your radio on, Dana,
and the poem you write will be me.