In the back seat of a Cadillac, bloated, 

white boots, white hat, blue suit, all

colored with pain of every stripe,  

 

a bottle of bonded bourbon in hand,  

riding on one shot of morphine and then,  

in Knoxville, two more: they’d driven  

 

north into ice and weather

on the cusp of a new year, aiming  

to make recompense for everything:

 

someone once described his drunkenness  

as shambolic, and it took misunderstanding  

the word twice—first Shambhala, then  

 

shaman—until I got it: shambles, as in  

flesh shelf, precisely that Cadillac’s  

back seat, that literal falling apart,  

 

as the teenage driver sped on

and on for the sake of the contract  

and its penalty clause, right up  

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to Oak Hill hospital, West Virginia,  

where two doctors pronounced him dead:

he’d been booted from the Opry  

 

to the Hayride, and first one, then  

a second marriage gone wrong, the body  

bad from the start, spina bifida  

 

occulta predicting the entire pandemonium:  

now I’m listening to the last song  

he ever charted, listening hard

 

for the hurt, and the will to thwart it,

redeem the losses in a voice so brash,

and brother if I stepped on a worn-out dime  

 

I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was  

heads or tails, thin shoe sole figuring

how every harm marked the body:  

 

just a skinny twenty-nine when he went,  

but this song—the cool chin up as  

the fiddle scrapes, the beat squares, guitar

 

slides liquid—all telling how  

this vernacular requires a wreck. 

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