Me & the Devil Blues
-For Robert Johnson
BY MARK WAGENAAR
Near the crossroads where I once saw the devil,
the moon’s lost her song to the rain,
picking a tune to drown the sorrows of the world.
It’s a story as old as time itself, poor Abel.
It’s not by chance they found his killer on the run
near the crossroads where I once heard the devil
recite the killer’s exact words, as if reading from a bible
of weariness: I been wandering the world since it began.
A tune to drown the sorrows of the world?
Better hope there’s some whiskey in that still.
I was wandering to & fro, running hooch between
counties, & heard the devil at the crossroads, on a fiddle
of silver & shadow, his hands a blur, slick as oil,
lonely as a lighthouse. There’s a price to hear a song
that will drown the sorrows of the world:
you might tell him you’ve nothing to trade, he’ll tell
you different (he’s just after a little company).
Near those crossroads we can still hear the devil
sing: it wasn’t me that tried to drown the world.
BY MARK WAGENAAR
Near the crossroads where I once saw the devil,
the moon’s lost her song to the rain,
picking a tune to drown the sorrows of the world.
It’s a story as old as time itself, poor Abel.
It’s not by chance they found his killer on the run
near the crossroads where I once heard the devil
recite the killer’s exact words, as if reading from a bible
of weariness: I been wandering the world since it began.
A tune to drown the sorrows of the world?
Better hope there’s some whiskey in that still.
I was wandering to & fro, running hooch between
counties, & heard the devil at the crossroads, on a fiddle
of silver & shadow, his hands a blur, slick as oil,
lonely as a lighthouse. There’s a price to hear a song
that will drown the sorrows of the world:
you might tell him you’ve nothing to trade, he’ll tell
you different (he’s just after a little company).
Near those crossroads we can still hear the devil
sing: it wasn’t me that tried to drown the world.
MARK WAGENAAR is the 2011 winner of the Felix Pollak Prize, for his manuscript Voodoo Inverso. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s MFA program—where he won an Academy of American Poets Prize—and in Fall 2011 he'll be transferring from the creative writing PhD program in poetry at the University of Utah to the literature PhD program at the University of North Texas, where he'll be sitting at the feet of Bruce Bond & Corey Marks. He is the 2011 winner of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art's contest, Phoebe's Greg Grummer Poetry Award, & the I-70 Review's Gary Gildner Award. He has two chapbooks forthcoming from Finishing Line Press & Pudding House, & his poems appear widely, including most recently in Subtropics, the Southern Review, the New England Review, /nor, the Antioch Review, the South Carolina Review, the North American Review, Phoebe, Tar River Poetry, & Poetry East.