Jimmie Wayne Speaks From Heaven, Should There Be Such A Place

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

                                                                                                                                       (Click on Photograph)

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

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.