Dear Mr. Bill

When you left Church Hill at 82    where you were born & raised  & came to Montgomery, took a job

in a shoe factory & slept nights    in the back room of a funeral home,  was it hard for your fingers to learn

to stud leather, & did the syncopation    of a latching machine settle into you  ‘til rain fell through your bones,

‘til you stopped & set up a studio    on a crate near a blacksmith shop  & began drawing reveries on scraps

of yellow cardboard? You’d been a slave    & a sharecropper, & overnight figures  grew out of straight-edged rectangles.

As you penciled a row of tools you said,    “My white folks died & my children  scattered.” A big fat crow appeared.

Your hands were strong as a fighter’s,    but your eyes only craved balance  ‘til contours filled up with signifying.

When the shape of discarded paper    first worked an image in your head  down through your thick fingertips,

did you already know how to add    curvature to the human & animal  after years of carpentering in clay

& wood? You didn’t have to look    to capture dance in hue or an ogee,  to slant a figure on a hill or rooftop

balanced by a tilted whiskey bottle    or smoking pipe, with one eye  always opened, always in profile.

I’m drawn to the Blue Rabbit Running,    to the Hunter on Horseback, The Man  in Red Pants Pointing, almost pulled

into another time. But it’s the Red Dog    walking into cotton hemmed in by pines  that stops me, the Black Jesus still stunned

on dogwood. You would bring to life    each story as it stepped into a broken  frame. When you said, “I wanted to be

plowing so bad today, I draw’d me a man    plowing,” I felt myself casting a will  over two horses with rope & chain—

hitched to a plow, like a guide post.    Mr. Bill, did your Brown Lizardwith Blue Eye & the Ferocious Cat

lope out of a third mind? No wonder    Charles Shannon, with a trained eye,  saw your genius & aimed his camera

as you worked beside the Coca-Cola    & Dr. Pepper signs, the black boys  grown around you, before he curated

your drawings for the New South    & painted your image beside the door:  your bowed head, your strong hands.

He called you “the people’s painter,”    & we know it’s all tangled up in blood  thick as a vine knotted around a fencepost.

When you went up north to kinfolk,    away from the soil, & then returned  south with an amputated left foot,

was the strength of your constructions    almost gone, their balance half lost?  The surveyor’s level no longer cut

through, but without you, Mr. Bill,    the name Traylor would only be  two syllables of red Alabama dust.