Showing posts with label big guitar blues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big guitar blues. Show all posts

Monday, October 24, 2011

Big Guitar Blues

Big Guitar Blues

   Inspired by three works of art (assemblage and acrylic paint) by Becky Frehse:  
Col Legno Battuto, Divisi รก Due, and Playing By Heart (2010)


An old guitar enlarges, disrupts my evening, goes
through the roof, and multiplies its frets on up. I fetch
a step-ladder and start climbing between the d
and f strings. In night-air soon wind strums strings
and they buzz me to my bones. It doesn’t take long
to climb past that circular cave-mouth (weird echoes)
and get  too high—nice view of city lights: I feel
as if  I had to mention  that. Knuckles numb,

I start to hum a song I think the strings imply,
as now I hear all six and keep on climbing. Where
does this neck end? Won’t neighbors have reported
this by now? Mist has wetted frets. I slip, barely
hook my elbow on the pipe-sized string, recover.

I’m old, cold, and tired. Now one by one, each string
groans like a different-voiced, mournful beast. Somewhere
in clouds, some picker’s  tuning up. O man, O woman,
I got me some of them gargantuan guitar blues,
and I got my slippers on, not shoes.


Hans Ostrom 2011