Audio: Read by the author.

 

Robert Johnson walked to the crossroads,
the place where the spirits chatter,
and there he met a large Black man, some called him Satan,
some called him Legba, some called him Blues.
But, whatever he was, he took Robert Johnson’s guitar,
and he played the guitar, and played it well,
and when Robert Johnson returned to the land
of the living, the small towns, the juke joints, the bars,
and the fields of elation and suffering,
he was transformed in ways that let folks know
that he left something behind with that big Black man.
There is a faint line between gratitude and loathing,
the self, turning in on itself—for what does it deserve?
And it is not even a question in search of an answer,
for the answer, elegant as a prayer, is as ancient
as the pathologies of desperate people in search
of a cult of hubris that says we cannot make
of ourselves what we are not. It bears saying,
for the sake of this art, that Robert Johnson
is me, though my triumph was to leave the crossroads
intact. No one offered me the genius of fingers—
I waited, and the big Black man set the guitar down,
walked away with his bowlegs and strut, tossing
back, “Dat ting is out of tune.” So there is that.
Back in the square, no one turned their faces
from the glow of me, a few polite nods,
and the dogs moved along with their doggy
life, as the ancients like to say; and me,
I returned to my hut, sat and watched the world
pass me by, my heart thick with love in search
of a home. Perhaps this is ambition, this persistent
hunger. Today is a day of stomach cramps,
the hollow melancholia of the interim, the slough
between mountains, and this, too, is what it must be.