Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
What instrument is more American and more expressive of our fraught history than the five-string banjo? I don’t play, but I love the music. These poems are my homage.
Fill a soup spoon with salt
& lower it into the Atlantic
singing: Dance, sailor,
dance with your captain,
your head’s too heavy,
your body’s too thin.
When the salt is gone
say in a loud voice
Are you thirsty now?
& wait for a gull to say Yes.
Walk backwards so
the incoming tide can’t follow
your footsteps home.
Repeat daily.
If banjos persist,
see a licensed hoodoo man.
A banjo is clamorous:
it is simple, & knows nothing.
Banjos make a mock at sin,
but among the righteous there is favor.
It is sport to a banjo to do mischief,
but a man of understanding has wisdom.
He that begets a banjo does so to his sorrow,
& the father of a banjo has no joy.
He that troubles his own house shall inherit the wind,
& the banjo shall be servant to the wise of heart.
As snow in summer & as rain in harvest,
so honor & a banjo don’t mix.
A dream comes from a crowd of troubles
& a banjo’s melody comes from a crowd of notes.
For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the music of the banjo.
A banjo’s strings enter into contention
& its head invites a beating.
A stone is heavy, a sandbag strains your arms,
but a banjo’s wrath is heavier than them both.
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise
than for a man to hear the music of banjos.
Go from the presence of a banjo
when you perceive not the notes of knowledge in it.
As a dog returns to his vomit,
so a banjo player returns to his banjo.
Forsake the banjo & live,
& go in the way of understanding.
The banjo knows
what it’s like to be sky,
how high pressure brings
the clearest sound.
I read about a woman
without a vaginal opening
who still conceived
& gave birth through a Caesarian.
This is more or less
how a banjo makes music,
is it not? She had lovers,
oh yes. And one of them,
jealous, had stabbed her
in the stomach,
permitting his rival’s semen,
which she had taken orally,
to find & fertilize
her unsuspected egg.
Maybe this is
an urban legend but
it sounds like something
that ought to happen
in a world with banjos in it.
Who needs root-workers?
The streetcorner pusher,
the New Age huckster,
the Big Pharma barker
all prescribe the same
white bomb
for everything,
expanding like a cloud
in a clear sky.
Saved by a banjo, she turned
into someone forever glancing
in the rear-view mirror,
someone given to sudden,
unpredictable spasms of laughter.
The amount of space
her arms now claimed with
their emphatic gesticulations
alarmed even herself:
how unladylike!
She stopped smoking & enrolled
in truck-driving school
because, she said, she didn’t
ever want to slow down.
She’d pull into rest areas
on the high plains, hold
the banjo in her lap & listen
to the non-stop wind.
One scant & skinny time
alone with the astrolabe,
Columbus had a vision of stomachs
blown up thump-hard
& strung with horsehair,
& when he came to,
his mouth was full of the taste
of bitter almonds. All day
his shadow crept around him
on the deck, seeping into
every godforsaken cranny as
he plotted his next voyage:
ascending the world’s nipple by ship.
Surely the Caribs hadn’t
gotten there yet & spoiled it
with their deplorable dietary preferences.
But he saw again
those stark ribs—
frets on a lute, rungs to the crow’s nest–
& below, that pot
in which by the cheerful sound of it
something was bubbling,
something irreplaceable
was being melted down.
The folk concept of a dancing crow pre-dates the Jump Jim Crow ministrelsy and has its origins in the old farmer’s practice of soaking corn in whiskey and leaving it out for the crows. The crows eat the corn and become so drunk they cannot fly, but wheel and jump helplessly near the ground where the farmer can kill them with a club. —“Jump Jim Crow,” Wikipedia
While a blackface
musician pays Jump
Jim Crow for
the assembled yokels, oh Lord—
the fake Indian sweating
in a scratchy blanket
holds up a bottle, holds it up:
pale blue universal nostrum of frost
whose patent can stay pending
almost indefinitely.
It’s impossible not to buckdance.
I swear they turn a key
somewhere in my liver
& banjo us with the bright
plink of coins.
This is one church where
we’re all in on the joke
& no one expects the wine
to be anything but whiskey.
A freight hurtles by & we rock
in its sudden wind,
its whistle better
than any pipe organ.
When your baby wails
like that, cracks Indian Bob,
it’s time for a spoonful,
& the banjo man winks & taps
his rawhide belly.
Somewhere John Brown
is plotting treason, & You—
You are with the sparrows,
rapt, watching how
comically they hop.
Where guitar says body, banjo says head.
Where guitar says soundboard, banjo says membrane.
Where guitar says six, banjo says one for each finger.
Where guitar says bridge, banjo says keep going.
Where guitar says hole, banjo says full.
Don’t be fooled:
this whitefaced smile,
these nickel-plated teeth,
this laughter can fuck you up.
Just ask the sadistic master
whose slave put the banjo on him—
composed a devastating satire
with a rolicking tune.
Men was a-singing it while cutting
trees out in the woods.
Women singing it in the fields.
Even the little children
played games to that song.
Pretty soon folks was singing it
all up & down the river.
Master Robert couldn’t go
nowhere among the slaves
without hearing something of it,
maybe just the tune without the words,
like they was humming it—
so Richard Creeks remembered
decades later.
Why laughter? Because tears
were expensive, love meant staking
your happiness on a master’s good will,
but laughter was free.
The banjo doesn’t ask which star
turned a blind eye on your birth.
It doesn’t lullaby or sweet-talk
like some guitar.
And because its father was a goat
& its mother was a gourd vine,
all the while you’re shaking,
head tilted back, it’s climbing
& stripping your tree.
*
Italicized lines condensed and lightly edited from “Richard Creeks on Songmaking,” in A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore by Harold Courlander (Southmark, 1996), pp. 376-377.
I am untroubled by serpents
or the marinated feet of pigs.
I bear no antipathy toward bears
or the bees they bedevil,
& the devil never tempts me
to any evil I can’t invent on my own
(forgive me if I don’t delve into the details).
What makes me break down is a banjo,
lonesome as our only god the clock
but with two hands, both of them fast.
Looking in its open back
can be disconcerting: What makes it go?
There’s nothing but a bare rod
& the smell of rain.
Where’s the balance wheel?
The escapement?
The gear train?
It calls to me, the ghost in its machine.
Play it, son!
Make it ring like a hammer on steel
& rattle like a Gatling gun
until it smokes.
The shack was hers,
every plank & plunk of it.
In heat when they treed her,
bleary with need, she had let
the dog get between her
& the door.
She went up the tallest
walnut she could find,
but the man struck
the bark with the flat of his axe
& listened—
she felt its long deep shiver
as if it were her own.
We’ll take ’em both,
he told the slobbering hound,
& began to chop.
With each blow
her claws dug farther in
& her sex pressed down
like a third & spellbound ear.
She rode it to the ground
where the dog & the axe were waiting.
A lifetime later
her hide still held fast
to the walnut wood.
The shack was hers,
every plank & plunk of it.
Five strands of gut
thin as claw marks
stretched from top to bottom
of the only door.
*
I am indebted to Foxfire 3 for information on making catskin (and other) banjos. Their older informants were recalling practices from their youth in the southern Appalachians around the beginning of the 20th century.