Photograph courtesy of Unsplash
Making Love to Buddy Guy
By Patricia Smith
I’m talking about the man at 80—trickling Jheri curl ol skool
now razored down or just plain fell out to make way for sparse
and stubbled silver, his smile an improvidence of gold and rot
Yea, I hear you knockin’
Here I come to let you in
Hear that stone cold knockin’
Here I come to let you in
and that mile-low dip in his shoulders, that thing that happens
when the grave first whispers the deserted verbs of our names
and, like fools, we bend our nosy asses down to listen. I peel
Got my pork chops sizzlin’
Got this room set up for sin
him of denim and sharkskin, and our slow tighten-up is doused
in florescence, the slap glare of dressing room bulbs squawks
bumps and fat, muscle dwindles down, the night’s knife-sharp
Bring it o’er here, sweet daddy
Let me love you, stem to stern
Bring it o’er here, sweet daddy
Let me love you, stem to stern
ensemb crumples to gummy tiles. There is rampant spill from
spandex, an ain’t-believing inhale that just got to be let loose.
Never seen fit to damn no man with this half century of creak
Let’s don’t waste no time with talkin’
Cause we got so much to learn
and droop, but this man here beguiles with the hesitation twang
and the stutter of porch, a dusty lust as close as real religion
gon’ ever get to me. I so obsessively hatched the ravish, nights
Turn them lights down, baby
Turn them down till they burn blue
Turn those lights down, sugar
Turn them down till they burn blue
all edgy with him, his ladled sugar mouth, air ’sissippi thick,
shards of pig and bacon grease funking in Mason jars beneath
the sink. I nibble grime from his fingers, savor dizzy nails black
What we need with ’llumination?
In this dark, just me and you
with Lucky Strike reek and bass string, I am mad slow with their
indents, their boisterous scars. I bite a little torch into the wilting
comma of his lifeline and for the first time, sound. He moans as
Love those blues songs, darlin’
When you growl it low and hiss,
Sing those songs, big daddy
When you growl those lies and hiss,
juke, he moans as blue elder. Death, stanking aloud and scarlet,
sprawls wide-legged on the couch across from us, pretending
to be detached, but she can’t resist tapping a bony toe in time
Go in deep and whisper
“You ain’t had no man like this.”
to our gasping waltz. Buddy’s left eye on me is milky, starved,
so oddly unmoored, hooch-fused. His gut beneath my hand is
an errant gush of rivers. I trace shake down the sudden raised
Make me lose my power?
I don’t think you ever could
Make me lose my power?
I don’t think you would or could
road of his chest, on him downtempo, a lesson I learned from
the west side of every damned woman. Funk, the whole funk
and nothing but, is deluge. We couple, washed in the smudged
But you work that hoodoo
Tryin’ to turn me out for good
glow of shot glasses that are unwashed but rinsed and rinsed in gin,
hefted, blistered a nasty gold. Clawing my waist, he screams the name
of his first guitar, conjuring the outline of her splintered hips, his sweet
migration, south to north, across a silent girl. But I am wide aloud, we
are in Chicago and a little church leaks from our tangle. He prays to just
stay alive, howling like our stink in this room. And I strive to be his lyric.
Patricia Smith reads “Making Love to Buddy Guy”
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