Magic

Watch this , eyes closed if you want - hear what I hear. Strange vowels that were almost gone by the time I was able to listen. The pure South of a pre-tv Georgia. Not the hills and valleys of my own piedmont/ mountain twang, but the soft red clay sound that comes from Atlanta and beyond, down to Savannah, west as far as it went.

This poem has been there for me for a very long time. During a recent unpleasantness I would make long absent Mark drink and read it to me.... ( and I wonder why is is gone...) It fit the time - longing for something lost, looking for something more, needing something.
 We came along at the very last breath of what was Buckhead, and even then you had to look so very hard to find anything at all. Creeky oiled floors and pawned silver, by then way way to many people, just like myself, pretending to be something we were not. A Blazer from Spencers, a pair of shoes from Muse's or a hair cut from a very old barber - who never could get it through his head that thirty year old me did not go to Ga Tech, and that the boy I was always with was much more than just " my friend " - but not even close to a real Buckhead boy.

Reading this in 1969, with twenty years before still as fresh as that very night -seen from 2013 is impossible. Atlanta burned many times over, rebuilt , built over , money, money, money, till Buckhead itself over reached and became a ghost town. Not better or worse , I stopped doing that, just different.

What a treasure to have found this.




and Monday August 4th , 2008 from the k+b.