ETHERIDGE KNIGHT'S BLUES (for Eunice Knight-Bowens) Behind bars you found your voice and sang your down-home Mississippi Blues about the Avenue that was Indiana and you dug Wes Montgomery's guitar and sang the beauty of the sisters but felt the pain of the wound inflicted in Korea that led to the holes in your arms. When I walk past the Barton Towers at 555 Mass. Avenue where you lived the last years of your life and passed into spirit when your cells kept exploding, I think of you on the 13th floor looking out at the exotic Murat Temple where I heard B.B. King's guitar hold its drawn-out breath for such a gut-bucket street singer as you and at the red-brick German Athenaeum that was almost demolished for a parking lot until it resurrected like the phoenix where beer-garden music rocks the summer night. Indiana and Mass Avenues as you knew them may be gone, but when sister Eunice took me and sister poet Allison to stand at your grave in Crown Hill Cemetery as her persistent way of keeping your memory, your legacy, and your song alive, I felt your presence and knew you a free singer still be, brother. I love your poems, Etheridge Knight. I come to honor your spirit that will never die. I say your song will always be sung and the Blues shall always go on.

Back in the woods near the edge of our property, Mother carried a squawking white chicken by the legs in one hand and a hatchet in the other. She was still a farm girl. She stopped at a stump, put the chicken’s neck on the flat rings of the amputated tree, and whacked that chicken’s head clean off, then let go. Blood spurting all over the leaves, that headless chicken did a terrible dance of death, flapped its wings, turned lopsided circles until it finally came to rest on its side in the leaves. Those legs let go, Mother picked it up and had scalding hot water ready to drop it in.... She plucked the feathers off with deft fingers, cut that carcass right open, saved what needed to be saved, got rid of what could not be used, and walked back into the house ready to do her next chore. I saw splattered blood on those leaves after a good rain rinsed them off.

Muggy Indiana summer and a crew fed strips of veneer through glue-rollers, layered them between sheets of metal on the table we wheeled toward the press, fed them into different levels, pulled the switch, and watched those jaws clamp shut like a series of angry vices. Temperature in that sweaty concrete- block inferno rose to beyond bearable as the press sizzled and cooked that veneer into plywood. When the load was done, we opened the press and glue- steam puffed out and stung our eyes and nostrils. Chief, my buddy from the southeastern neck of the county with the ruddy face and high cheekbones, always carried the impression of a half- pint bottle in the back pocket of his overalls. Many mornings he never made it to work. As soon as the whistle blew at the end of the day, I lit and puffed a Lucky Strike, ached to smack the cover off a softball, and longed to tap that pony of beer as soon as the league game was over.

She receives my friend and me with a gentleness that puts us at our ease, appreciates that he wants a good but not too expensive bottle of wine for an important occasion, the birthday of a friend. Her light brown hair, which she could let flow, is tied back. She is dressed in soft denim, her pale blue eyes ripple with a warmth that burns like a low flame she will not allow to flare higher. She gives us a graceful but understated tour of all her shop can offer, says what is appropriate, but no more, for each bottle of wine that might suit such an occasion. With a smile that does not say too much, she lets my friend come to his own conclusion. When he selects just the right wine, she nods and smiles again as if to confirm his good taste. Although her eyes do not open in the wrong kind of way, it is hard not to let yours come to rest on hers that are so delicate and warm. You can tell she understands. Some eyes are for looking, some are for looking into, some may be for touching, but there are also blue eyes that know they should remain open enough for others to enter, but not so far they can wander where they know they should not go.

(after a photograph by Andreas Riedel) They have driven a tractor pulling a wagon to this spot that has drawn them here before and parked it in the shade and filled wooden crates stacked on the wagon and they are under a tree that fans wide and full and there is windfall scattered on the ground with sun shining on the field beyond and they both bend over to gather the best to put in wicker baskets and this slow dance of touching the ground at the same time parallel to one another they have done before and will do again until they no longer can breathe and are laid in wood into this earth.