Zydeco Snow

Before my first National Cowboy Poets’ Gathering, I assumed it would be nothing but white guys emulating Baxter Black – which is not bad. But the folks in Elko who put this event together are intentionally cosmopolitan. The first event I ever attended was a concert of Mexican corridos performed by artists from our neighbor to the south. My next event was a concert by the Cowboy Poets of Kyrgystan. Amazing Asian folk traditions expanded my horizons.

This year’s guests were from the Southeastern United States. That made sense. The Southeast has produced cowboy legends like the immortal Florida wrangler Bone Mizell. So my mind was open to the two Florida cowboy poets who opened tonight’s show, Swamp Tunes. The mediocrity of their verse was punctuated by base insulting rudeness and on one occasion an “inartful” racial slur. The dignity of Elko was saved only by my having failed to bring fruit to the event.

However, they were only the openers. The main act was a 5-man Black zydeco band from South Louisiana. Washboard and drum rhythms drove the accordion melody. The artists were more than talented. They were inspired and inspiring. Cajun music, kin to country, has its own charm, but this was zydeco -- a celebratory cousin to blues. The music was so aesthetically compelling I was lost in it. A truly spiritual experience. Someday we must have a zydeco mass.

When I stepped outside the Folklife Center, the music still pulsing in my body, snow was falling from a sky my poet friend Lyn Lifshin would call “onyx.” Life is good despite Florida poets.

Mystery & Redemption On The Road To Elko

Maybe it was the cloud of unknowing. My day long drive from Las Vegas to Wells was mostly uneventful -- skies variable, roads mostly clear. At Wells I turned west on I-80 shortly before sunset. The skies by then were partly cloudy, but mostly bright, enough blue to lift the spirits. Then I saw a cloud in front of me -- not in the sky but lying across the road -- a dark cloud mass come to earth.

I drove into the cloud, then saw an orange circle of light straight ahead -- the sun "as through a glass darkly" -- bright but not at all too bright to look at directly. The sun shown into the cloud, which had been grey on the outside, but on the inside, the cloud was like orange smoke shifting.

At first, it was not snowing in the cloud, but dry snow was blowing across the highway from south to north. This this was not a small cloud. I was in it for awhile. About halfway through, it began snowing, the flakes rushing toward my windshield as if they were flying parallel to the ground. It stopped. Then I drove out of the cloud and the day was bright again.

We had a good clergy conference today at St. Paul's. One of the good people there treated me to a ticket to tonight's opening of the National Cowboy Poets' Gathering. I arrived early and was browsing in the bookstore of the Western Folklife Center when I had my moment of redemption. I was redeemed not from my moral failings but from the regrettable hat blunder I committed in Fernley last year. See blog entry for 8-23-09 "The Social Risk Of Hats In The American West."

Dressed for Elko in jeans, a heavy long coat, and my Frontier Collection Renegade style cowboy had from J. M. Capriola's Western Wear, I was standing stock still, hands in coat pockets, focussed as I was on the covers of some chap books on a bottom shelf. That is when a nicely dressed lady mistook me for a manequin.

Feeling grateful for the gift of the tickets and somewhat pleased with myself for having "passed," I especially enjoyed the show which featured Virginia City troubador, Richard Elloyan, and perhaps Nevada's premier cowboy poet (he at the least has the premier mustache), Waddie Mitchell.

HAITIAN RAIN

The Haitian rain
falls heavy.
Birds sing to it
songs in strange bird tongues.
By the merest glint
of light,
the lonely curiosity
of the alien,
understands these birds
better than
the people.


HAITIAN LIGHT

Haitian light
so other
than
Iona’s, Delphi’s, Nova Scotia’s.
Softish here the light
and languid.
Light’s difference
does not look
different.
It others how
all things appear.
I would be changed
by a vision
– not something seen –
but a way of seeing.



GENERATIONS

Les Beaux remote
mountain village.
The church concrete
& cinder block.

Guilene, in yellow
skirt and top
neatly pressed
and grey New York baseball cap
over tight black ringlets,
may someday be Haiti’s second
woman priest.

But now, bent double,
in her Sunday best,
she mops the church floor
with a towel,
pulling outside
last night’s rain.

And now
she sits
beside her mother
in plaid suit
and scarf
yellow, black, purple,
blue, & orange
knotted at the top.

They are waiting
for something
to begin.