From the Basement Tapes

Brian, I’m still calling you Brian,

it’s raining and Sunday where you gig

now, or it isn’t. I can only reconstruct

you from the stickers, scabbed

and bleaching on the punished body

of your gnarly Tanglewood.

The nurse reattached your fingertip,

but a wallop from the yard brush

ruptured your eardrum.

One less ear for tinnitus to fuck,

you’d smirk, no polished savant you

but your hands were charmed.

You’d oblige when a haze of stragglers

at the party passed the toy ukulele,

pluck until the big fella wept.

Ais, moonlighting as a dilettante

astrologer for pub money, saw collisions

in your nativity, tapping an ochre nail

on your tenth house of fame

in the horoscope she’d drawn in air

and that cinched it.

One time you said we’d tour Egypt.

But Brian I’ve pawned my tinny amp

and the Stratocaster wasn’t mine to keep.

Story with rent? Even a frontman

of your cut and sacrée tignasse

might be turfed out on a landlord’s whim.

But I know the story. Or I do its gist.

The scraggly contours. Box bedroom. Skint.

Don’t ask me how, but I feel

some tomorrow your name will occur

and I’ll shrug no news since this.

I’ll wish I asked then, why Egypt?

Maybe don’t wade out so far alone

some beautiful day in June

until the sound stops.

Just square this as a crappy phase

of the moon’s twenty-and-eight.

I want tortoiseshell plectrums for you.

Whisht is what you say, a querying thumb

jabbed in the direction of the bar

where the tune is jangling down.

You know what it is.

You’ve heard it before, you think—where?

It’s not my place to say.