Poem for Bob Dylan On his 52nd Birthday
To bypass the City states you turned your eyes to the cold mountains of the American guitar heroes born of salt and uneasy flesh she lit you a pipe and you turned with flashing blue eyes to the summits of old kings & ancient highways blessed by the summer-belt voyant and lost seer who turned his music into a cantankerous rhythm of underground saints & soldiers carved into your steel strings happy only by the soul's moon your beard of silver teeth flashing like dust in the wind you the same minstrel boy of Midwestern lakes & salty tongues you who came without the language of ghosts brought electricity to its knees and laughed as you sighed into your harmonica with the keys out in the rain breaking the starboard rails of yesterday's bed bums & the sea of youth in boots of Spanish leather turned into Woody's long forgotten hammer black & hammering a piano of concrete born in time you cured the flame's twilight tongue with your crying trains in midnight along with your watchtower of vatic blues singing to the uptight angels in denim jeans and boots of stripped velvet you hung onto the ceiling of doubt and stood in naked light with a strong gin nose hanging on a belt of eclectic rainbows you telling stories of the South with your black loaves of sugar bread hanging to dry out in the Florida Sun like elderly beauties blind to the red parting sea and hankering for a Judy Collins Winter with vintage jelly rolls tired of the barking dogs that run free through your beach house and your iron gate paranoid about the media-robbers of grave digging Truth your trash searched with spotlights of distress crumpled pianos hide in your black sweaters sunglasses too cool for the portico wind to blow in stars of summits lit in fiery bandages of dead earth yet moving across the blue sky you turned to the cinema and cast your tired glare onto white celluloid of broken chasms filled with cartoons of fever and tales of the languid mornings where the train of lit candles burned in carrying the Wall outside your living-room painted with belongings of a hurt camera that is buried in the purple snail's hidden flesh and shells of tinkling silver bracelets singing in a quick siren of laughter and loving the high godless struggle with the Madonna of tomorrow you saddle- sore and teeth bare smile in the erotic gaze of an absolute pony express with a dozen dead windows and five hand-me-down leather hats where the horses smell like whiskey of a thousand dead rimbauds with Africa on your mind you the mystic of baseball and apple-pie turn and gaze into the idiot wind of a blond saddle of quiet desperation have given us the bright and cheerful faith of a hanging desperado with clear eyes and the slow train of memory return to the handsome fate of children holding candles out for you in a rainy May of cold coves in beach sweat an hour before you washed your hands electric blue tangled in the starry plough of your night hidden moon on top of white knees you push the Word through an earthen vessel opened to the wings of the Sun. Eric Walker May 24th 1993
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray