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  • Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab, and: Mudlark Shuffle
  • David Wojahn (bio)

Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab

Black lacquered circle & the sound coaxed from diamond to rest within the acetate glimmer, the agon & the joys commingling. Nina Simone

is conjuring The Boat of Ra Little Darling from a long cold lonely winter, though outside it is August & is not all right. Double doors,

then again double doors. You will sign in: & they’ll rifle your pack of oranges & candy bars, pry open the plastic case & hold the gray

Maxell against the light. Immense are the tears of Levi Stubbs. How sweet how sweet the honeybee. The Smiths are in a terrible place. O Oscillate

Wildly Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, to be followed in turn by Mr. James Brown, his own pleas trembling the Apollo rafters.

Visiting hours—in the tv room the Haldol reigns. The President struts among the SS gravestones, pompadour shiny as a new lp, his movie-actor gait

turned thank God to pastel vapor by Miami Vice. Flamingos starburst from the credits. Shyly she will walk the corridor to meet you, your offerings

of Earl Grey, the two black turtlenecks. Nails cobalt—fingers a-tremble. Gun Shy, Screaming Blue Messiahs, Dylan at his nadir adnoiding [End Page 87]

Brownsville Girl—down here even the swap meetsare getting a little corr-upt. Richard Thompson When the Spell Is Broken, Jimmy Cliff’s

in limbo waiting for the dice to roll. When her roommate leaves, you’ll sit with her upon the bed. Awkward, you will small talk, staring

at your hands. More doors, double doors & triple, the years the years. Down the carved names the future with its labyrinths & tailspins, rooms

giving way to rooms, the upturned car, the notebooks cuneiformed with numbers, pivot & gyre, cache of Rx pads stuffed into a rolltop drawer. 90 rabid

troubled minutes, coda Robert Johnson. Stones on my passway & my road seem dark as night. Her eyes in memory an astonished blue. You reach inside your jacket

& she holds it in her upturned palm. From the bedside table she lifts the Walkman—the button with its triangle, the click, the whirr, the eddying forward.

Mudlark Shuffle

There too the specialties abounded. The toshers with their lanterns wade the dawnlit river to their chests, clownish pockets stuffed

with bits of copper, chunks of coal, eight-foot poles to save themselves should they stumble in some quagmire. [End Page 88]

Behind come the mudlarks, children mainly, snatching from the ooze what the toshers discard. Cabin doors shutting,

iPod on Shuffle. Sweet Thames runs softly, on whose banks move Thy gatherers bending to scoop pure into their sacks—

dogshit sold to tanners & employed to soften leather. Bonepickers, Dredgermen, nightsoil men, ragmen who could range

thirty miles per day, the Docklands to Hampstead. A warehouse of bones, a warehouse of pure, a room for clean rags,

another of the soiled. Tray tables upright & the turbines’ whirr. A room to die from cholera, a room to perish from consumption.

The specialties abound. The Suit to my right is Finance, Suit to the left, Technology. As we crawl from the gate,

they power down their cells in unison, the ringtone of Finance being the wail of Janis Joplin begging Yahweh for a Benz.

The steward clicks shut his seatbelt lariat & the conversation ebbs. At low tide they’d flock along Blackfriar’s Bridge. A mudlark might,

reports Mayhew, earn a penny per day. Beside me columns shimmer from a laptop. Below, the egg-white clouds. Finance

grimaces. His friends all drive Porsches & therefore he must make amends. His cursor glides to Hong Kong. He can’t explain

his job in laymen’s terms. You might find a log to dry & sell as firewood. Brass buttons & buckles were especially prized. [End Page 89]

The mode is Shuffle. A digitized Berryman slurs out Dream Song 29. From a public housing project in Holly Springs,

Mississippi, Junior Kimbrough removes some yearning from himself, as though by psychic surgery, some foreign object

glistening in his palm & set beside his battered Gibson. You better run, you better run. Below is...

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