Rice: Poems

Brown Country

113 Brown Country I ain’t turning Redcoat in my old age and you don’t have to wonder no more if ’n I’m a fool for love and if ’n I am does that make me country Here somebody hold my jacket these pretty fringes keep jumping the strings and this here is a geetar song that really needs to play Why certainly I loves country am partial to a sad sappy love song And head back howling for a lost love I live to the tune of hoping hopelessly I am country and drawn to the music of the land not the red on the white in the blue but the green and the amber and the ochre-orange country Natively black foot with land earth ocean where fathers and their mothers smoldered in the name of the Union how come ain’t no sad country songs about Indians being holocausted or Africans jumping the broom on Sundays for to never see their sweetie again When it’s only me I turn the car radio to it 114 the spot where God-Family-Country live polygamously through the silence a voice laughs asking “You ain’t really gonna listen to that are you?” Yeah Good Buddy I’m listening so let the chips fall where they may Because I do do so love the brown and the black of the red on the white in the blue Does loving country and craving a song that brings my own black-balled eyes up to the depth of my haunted-hunted heart does that make me a country music fan a natural for sorrow a Charlene Pride of poetry a Black country singer with acoustic and eraser plucking a nappy live wire I who sing along with the twanging of the car radio with country songs when nobody is listening how do you explain being African and loving country not the red or the white in the blue but the green and the amber and the ochre-orange You never explain just let the good times roll Carolina born so I seen it all from sea to shining sea island 115 I play it back to you with a pencil-sharp guitar and hambone hard with the other I come backed by fiddle and calypso and on certain notes my Gullah starts to drawl Mercy me I’ll throw my head back in a minute even close my eyes tight when I sing it’s always something about losing my head or making up with or just plain wallowing in the pain of love awwww come on now you know how it goes I’m no Dolly or Billy Ray But I sho am country And when I’m gone please somebody feed the cat and in return I’ll make my voice low country quiver real good then roll out for you you laughing but this really ain’t nothing “shakey bakey” cause I know folks born in a holler who scream all their life and nobody ever writes a song about them shouldn’t that be a country’s song too or is that only poverty the private property of bluesmen and plumbleached women another jurisdiction another country 116 At the end of my singing it’s always so Grand Ole Opry hot that my mascara’s usually running and by then the Breck hairspray has wilted my locks back down to lion-size normal and I’m ready to unhitch my silver buckle drop my jean skirt to the floor and find me some indigo to wrap back around my waist WellShootGoodBuddy what more do I have to do to prove it I tell you it’s true I am a Black country singer cause what there is for me to sing about should make you push your beer to the side and take a walk through some black family farmland some black burial grounds now sold and desecrated by golf-ball signs that say Private Drive should make you want to know this singing southerner’s truth it’s my job living in this brown country to take you inside of real live heartache and make you tap your foot long enough and make you smile at yourself until you recognize your daddy’s face floating in what I’m saying until you ask yourself as you walk away Does she really listen...