something my friend Ernest posted on his feed... thought some of you might enjoy this..... from Ernest Suarez Below is David Bottoms poem about sleeping in the Big House, the place in Macon where the Allman Brothers Band and family shared during the early days of Capricorn Records. The Big House in a ABB museum now. Kirk and Kirsten West owned and lived there for years before it became a museum. Davids poem was inspired by an evening he and I spent with Kirk West there in the early 90s. Im sure the formatting wont survive this pasting, but here goes. In the Big House of the Allman Brothers, My Heart Gets Tuned For Kirk Kirsten West Visitors sleeping in strange rooms may themselves be visited, surprised by a gauzy and uninvited guest, a curious gray eye peering over a dusty chiffonier. Visitors sleeping, yes, or trying to sleep sometimes may be startled, the muted walls, the closed and padlocked closets, even the floorboards seeping from their scars something knowable only in the dream. After twenty-eight years I find this out, buried in goose-down quilt and memory in a bedroom of a house I stood outside of once to hear through bricked Tudor wall and blanketed windows an electric concussion of bass and guitar. Steam off the asphalt, I remember, and that white blur of dogwoods along Vineville, sparkle of mushroom in magnolia shadow, bells of Saint James, blue jay chatter, and me on the spidered sidewalk, a kid, hero-struck . . . ~~~ Struck, sure, and dumb, an edgy tangle of high-voltage nerves, ragged-out in blue jeans and frat jersey, bloody ankles, bloody hands, wired and tripping, two-stepping backwards in Mexican sandals, a long blaze of hair off my shoulders, sombrero left hanging on the MG gear knob. But perhaps you, too, in some freaked-out greed for vision or grace, have found yourself chewing a mouthful of crabgrass, stupefied and afraid, skulking on all fours those briary terraces of Rose Hill Cemetery to pause on the edge of a crumbling wall and see in blue half-moonlight the granite slab of Elizabeth Reed tarnishing under the charcoal trees . . . Held breath and audible heartbeat . . . tree frog, night bird, tractor trailer groaning far up the interstate, and at the foot of the hill, in that lush pit of shadow, the river like a loose tongue. ~~~ I’d stumbled down those terraces to the bricked crypts bordering the railroad tracks and river. Little plazas cool as courtyards, Borges says, prowling through the mausoleums of Recoleta. Rhetoric of shadow and marble, inviting enough, sure, but at night in Rose Hill, in those alleys of maimed angels, a shabby Victorian dignity bordered on indignation. Still that music of river and something else . . . that late bird, far-off, like a whistler lonely in the afterworld, little prelude, little curtain-opener, and I waited for an hour on a marble tomb, drooling weeds, watching through a canopy of water oak the half-moon ringing a light-show over the far ridge of pines, opening act for a no-show. Looking for the dead? an angel drones, Don’t look here, nobody home. ~~~ But these rooms famously spirit-filled — that anonymous woman with her basket of wild flowers, climbing and descending the stairs, the boy in torn knee-britches, the dead brothers themselves caught more than once, rocking against the staircase banister. Grand and terrible, Jung hails the hereafter — thus, unperturbed by the grief of the bereaved, that icy silence of the dead. Terrible, yes — witness brother Greg, panicked and trembling, as the eyes of Duane’s photograph trailed him down the hall, the very way we tremble when we’re ripped from a nightmare and hang for a moment between two worlds. ~~~ Shadow-lace fluttering the ceiling, shifting star and circle, diamond, oval, eye, and who wouldn’t expect to see them again here in their own house, their features drawing shape from those shadows — mutton-chops and moustache of Howard Duane Allman, deep gaze I met one morning eye to bloodshot eye in a Kmart on Riverside, and those honey-sweet eyes of Berrie Oakley, sunken and calm as an effigy. Such reticence, though, such pity in their silence, neither touching the flattop worked from its case and propped, like a calling, against the wall. No, neither touching a string, though something is playing the bones of this house — strung-out memory or middle-aged panic — as I listen near the corner of sleep to the heating pipes, to the creaking floor beams and roof beams shifting toward the rhythm of my breath, as though the house, my heartbeat, the larger night, were all tuning up for the lifting of some curtain, the way one guitar will lean toward another in those final, unnerving moments of rehearsal . . .
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 14:49:55 +0000
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