When the notes don't sit in cliff-edged joy
of smoke rooms,
no bug-eyed carpet ride makes my jazz mouth move,
no pleasured riffs played to my heart bring satisfaction,
and spellbound words have lost the spell to soothe.
When overnight lovers have to leave before day,
a fortune teller friendship turns power play
and the family, in the interest of, cut away,
That's when I need a song, a story–
No, make it a holiday.
In some big world way Jack, you turned me loose;
your stories held things a country kid could hitch to.
They told of strange days, and wise crazed lives
who were always seeking
something special. And, of these lives,
some of them—stepped over the edge
and never quite back again.
You were somewhere along some highway
dressed in working boot, cotton shirt, open road
mysticism,
away from the suburbanite wine,
the pretentious church
the has-beens and yet to be, has-beens
and you drove to where you thought truth
might strike,
where the afternoon shines on clouds and hills
and the sun makes light rays spontaneous,
and you were taken in–
in to the constant
call of the blue hawk circling
the wide land's silence
until you forgot your sheltered and unbroken
tough man turned wet kitten response to truth
and these thoughts of you are stilled ...
... and in an old black car,
which was meaner and greasier
and more like police bait, and non-family and anti-state
I, young hitchhiker, Nullabor dusted, thin from India
travel with two Melbourne poets heading north.
I swear I saw you as we drank
and talked the highway rhapsody
dashboard drum beat punctuated
smoky-jazz-room cool and serious
as if the whole reason of the road
leads always towards this moment,
as if the whole reason of the road
leads always towards this moment ...
We milked that moment, Jack
as I do now thirty years on from where
the immediate poetry fuse-jumped our sheltering knowledge
and sent it
holy inclined and wayward,
sent it out, gone, sent it blown into the outness
of the open windowed world. Thank you, Jack.
