Blues for Frank

Young Man Blues

Leaning over the guitar, eyes intent
on skeletal fingers, strings leaping
with young man fire & long nights
burning those notes in the blue room

of dreams, to get past the half moon over
the broken city, the lost loves, to sing
thru to boom boom dawn running from
home & somehow find the tune that

salves the soul & sings free of the many
chains that break us all—taking the dark dream
within, living with it, not denying it,
when the sky is crying & there’s only

a pigfoot & a bottle of beer & a shaking
money maker to find some way to work
thru it, transcend it, burnish our hearts
with the suffering none can escape.

The gift taken

When the M.S. took his fingers & silenced his guitar,
he sang among blue-gummed skeletones of providence—
he sang & would not be still.

Lost to his great gift, he was still able to pluck out
“Camptown Races” on a banjo, that a young girl
might find a song.

In later years, even as his body curled against him
& left him abed, his angel Fran kept him that he might
sing & sigh with a friend.

Joining the chorus

Here's to Doehler-Jarvis workers coming home from the long shifts,
to Sicilian beauty and elegance silent presence in every gesture,

here’s to Woody Guthrie, to Bobby Dylan, to Spider John Koerner
and Robert Johnson, to Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson, to

Son House and Hank Williams, to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn,
to the 10,000 anonymous pickers & singers still in the blue dream,

to Grandma Josie whose recipes Sue learned by watching—
no measurements—to his many loves and his fierce friends,

years of running wild with a harp and a bottle of Southern Comfort,
yakking until 3 a.m., passing out and yakking again, with no

particular place to go and no end in mind—his old National Steel
& Martin guitars weathered classics silent, still now forever—now he’s

free in the rent party rag wang-dang-doodle where all careless
loves now rest, no police dog blues, hellhounds sighing beneath

the table with hambones and the wild women singing like Bessie
in every kitchen—let the freight train rolling thunder midnight

special wail down those tracks, trumpets blasting out every window,
free now in the blue chorus of wailing angels, free picking free

when the last deal’s gone down and where indeed we shall not be
moved, not be moved, not be moved, hang it on the wall, brother.

—for Frank Salamone (1947-2012)


David Cope

Mayday, 2012