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| "I see we meet again.." |
After all the Jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on Down Street
Footsteps dressed in red
And the wind whispers “Mary”....
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries “Mary..”
The traffic lights they turn a-blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags down stream
‘cause the life that lived is,
is dead
And the wind screams, “Mary”...
Will the wind ever remember
the names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age,
and its wisdom
It whispers “no, this will be the last”
And the wind cries “Mary”...
The talk about rock poets was worn out as early as the late 1970s, but the scribe proposes that the above is pretty damn good stuff.
After all the Jacks are in their boxes
and the clowns have all gone to bed...
What an opener. Easy to understand, and taking you nowhere. The second makes certain the witching hour, before dropping that double meaning. Are the “clowns” like the “jacks”; make believe and metaphorical? Or are the clowns the people without painted faces who make you laugh or cry depending? For that matter, are the Jacks real people, too? Their boxes merely their drafty apartments?
You can hear happiness staggering on Down Street,
footprints dressed in red.
Does happiness stagger? All things reaching the end stagger and what better place than Down Street? Dressed in red. The red of blood? Red crepe from the last party? It is up to you and maybe its yo mama’s Friday night red party panties. That would be your problem, or pleasure, depending.
And the wind whispers “Mary”...
“Oh, boo” you say, “the wind is ‘whispering’. How whispery!” But hey, hardly any knowledge is new and a poet returns to the box and reuses tools.
And besides, the wind whispers, “Mary”... and the scribe has always thought that, on the track, Jimi misses a great interpretative opportunity by not actually whispering “Mary” in his inimitable Hendrix way: “Mahray”
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life.
Yeah. We sweep drearily, all of us. But the broom itself? Why not when you’re talking about gathering up “the broken pieces of yesterday’s life”? You’ve left them behind right? Or maybe you just can’t face up to doing the job on your own. And you leave it to the broom.
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
The high-point of the piece. So much silliness, so much desperation, so many sixes crossing with sevens, all the madness and lunacy of the great push spread out in this simple dilemma of loose ends.
And the wind it cries “Mary.”
Whispered one time, crying the second. The wind is going someplace and we’re invited to follow its utterances, its voice.
The traffic lights they turn a-blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
And that’s him, Jimi Hendrix of Seattle, Washington, electric guitar god shedding the evening’s radioactivity on a mattress where he grinds his teeth and shakes his leg and lets the lights of the city color him green, yellow, red, Jimi, red – not blue.
The tiny island sags down stream
‘cause the life that lived is,
Is dead
As far as the tiny island, your guess is good as mine. Not that it matters because the poet is painting here and the primary colors are “down” and “dead”. Goes nice with that empty bed.
And the wind screams “Mary...”
Again. Imagine Jimi having worked his way (on the record) from whispering, to crying, to screaming. “Maaahraaay!”
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
Surely the wind has memory. That’s what we hear when it arrives, recollection and message from where it has been. Will it remember the names from the past? There must be so many, yet the wind is so vast, if inconstant.
And with this crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers “no, this will be the last.”
And the wind cries “Mary...”
Mary is last. Maybe you’ve met her.
