The other night I watched a documentary called “Desperate Man Blues” about a man who is an avid collector of old bluegrass and blues records. By old, I mean 78s from the 20s and 30s. He had a room called the record room where these records lined the walls–25 thousand records. Most of them he got  by combing the back roads in his area of the country, driving to farms to ask people if they had any old records to sell. The man he had a great time collecting in the fifties, because every house was getting a television and they were dumping  records out with the trash. One record he found–I wish I could think of the title–had been stored for decades under an old mattress, covered with dust in a box filled with otherwise worthless records. This one though, he believes to be the only existing copy of the recording. He played it on his record player, and boy did it sound great, a voice calling to you out of time like that.

The record room, with its wood paneling and floor-to-ceiling shelves of records–indistinguishable in their smoke-stained sleeves–reminded me of Jim Whitehead’s study, where I spent many a Fayetteville afternoon attempting to redeem poems I had written. 

It also made me think of the obscure copies of lit mages that I have piled up in my office both at home and and work–most of the copies are freebies, or contributor copies. I love thinking that one day down the line somebody could read a poem of mine in a print journal, which I fear will become a thing of the past, years and years after I’m gone–maybe read it alound to themselves and being my voice back like the voices on those records.  And as much as I love the work of making poems, it’s hard to think the poems that took so much of my energy rotting in a basement somewhere, just like I won’t let myself dwell too much on the inevitable DEEP sleep. I’m young, but, on my family tree, I just passed the halfway part. And the second half always moves faster than the first.