by Darrell Bourque
after her textiles
Woman with Guitar, I
& Woman with Guitar, II
I
You’ve curled nearly every line
in this piece you made.
You live inside a curved world.
Within the frame you’ve silked a guitar
& its bifurcation holds us to your intent:
one half of the guitar holds red dragon songs,
jazz contusions, anthems, and honky tonk tales;
the other half holds those delta blues &
spirituals & songs to go to sleep in.
In your hand nothing is clutter &
you have stitched places where wide pockets
of silence can reside side by side
with desire, what your ribs feel when
you think your heart will burst finally
& for good. The frets you’ve left
mostly outside the frame for us
to imagine. You are generous that way,
giving us a place to fix our fingers,
to move & press & make a music
given us by all these fans and the winds
bright brocade & shantung bring us to.
II
Bright brocade & shantung bring us to
ourselves in the way some songs bring us
to ourselves. Damask songs cross
oceans and silk songs are road songs
we sing however we happen to find
ourselves traveling. Memory sings
on denim and canvas and duck & on
fine-threaded cottons & on lawn even
if our travels are very fine travels
inside the timbre of some distant time.
The blues know no particular place
or space even if they seem to insist
that this desire measuring itself out
in singing is the only desire worth
a song. Blues hold the heart close
to what it wants and cannot have
in song time. The frets carved
& pierced we bring our fingers to
in the hope of touching who we are.
Songs are in fingers as they are
in heart and brain and belly and feet
III
& they travel wherever heart and brain
and belly and feet drag us to and will not
let us go, or get off easy. Songs of worry,
a compensation of chords to get us back
to who we are inside our dreams. People
we know live inside some songs, the old
people, brave ones, walkers and riders,
people on ships looking for some place
to be. And when we bring the guitar
close to the body as the woman does
in these pieces fashioned after song,
we can hear histories that matter to us.
The woman’s placed the instrument close
to where she breathes & it rests on a knee
perhaps. She takes to the frets for histories
we didn’t know were ours to tell, of people
we didn’t know we knew: stories of Mi’qmac
& Attakapas, of the old men of Martaize’ &
Saint Domingue, of Broussards & Trahans,
of Castilles & Babineauxs wavering like time
inside this curved & trembling world of ours.
