Gravel and Hawk: Poems

My First Record

10 My First Record It’s Johnny Cash at San Quentin— the second he recorded in a state pen— and the whole damned place goes wild when he sings the song he wrote about this very prison just the night before. So straight off Johnny sings it for them again. But “A Boy Named Sue” is the reason, at seven, I jones for it so bad I beg, “the mud and the blood and the beer” the line that something in my lawless heart so longs to hear repeatedly, I stamp, cry, pitch a fit when Mama says no way she’ll waste any money on it and makes me lug it back to the record aisle of Monkey Wards. The late August heat is murderous; we’re here shopping for school clothes. My oily fingertips slur against the cellophane wrapper as I set it back in the rack and slouch away, resigned, never guessing how, at Christmas, a month after Daddy’s been killed in the oilfield, I’ll get a gift-wrapped copy under the tree. Having already forgotten how much I’d wanted it, I get carried away all over again, chained by the boom- 11 chicka-boom to the console of a secondhand RCA Daddy bought before he died. I start listening closer to the lyrics of my favorite song, how the speaker’s daddy named him Sue to make him strong. He knew he wouldn’t be around to help raise his son, we understand: he just wasn’t that kind of a man. Then comes my favorite line. I see now it’s pretty thin glue holding this song together, stretching across its enormous gaps in logic. But I don’t really care. I just want Johnny’s voice, that resonant bass-baritone with a rich Arkansas finish, like the voice of God the Father, it seems to my ears, and like nothing I ever heard inside a church, or anything I’ll ever hear again inside our little rent house, except when I spin this record— over and over and over. ...