"...and it's Eastertime too"

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez
And it’s Eastertime too
And your gravity fails
And negativity don’t pull you through

Bob Dylan, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"  Highway 61 Revisited









Charles Wright, Negative Blue, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000

I'm not sure why Charles Wright's title is not identical to the Dylan lyric. It might be an accident, typographically or a result of an imperfect memory, or it might be purposeful. Ultimately it doesn't matter. What does matter is the accident of juxtaposition that happened to me on consecutive days.

Yesterday evening, Easter Sunday, my oldest son, not quite four and a half years old, and I were listening to some music before bed. He loves listening to music, but he is only four and therefore he prefers short songs (loves the Beatles--especially early/middle Beatles) and sometimes likes to move quickly from one song to another. Well, as it was Easter I thought of “Tom Thumb’s Blues” and clicked on it in iTunes. He liked it for the first verse or two and then he wanted to read a book, but that was enough to have the tune in my head as I went to bed a hour or two later.

It was still there buried behind my morning’s commute when I checked my email when I got to school and The Academy of American Poets, via their Poem-A-Day project for National Poetry Month, had sent me today’s poem. On the sidebar of that post, they had a link to today’s audio poem. That link was incorrectly marked as Charles Wright’s poem above—a poem I had never read. (It was actually a great poem by June Jordan—but that’s another subject.) The incorrect link, however, sent me on a search to find Wright’s poem. Thanks to Google Books, I was successful, and quickly.

Now memory and imagination were fully incited. The tune, the poem, and the rain on an Easter Monday windshield all existed together. I’m not lost, this is certainly no Juarez, but Eastertime it is and, lost or found, I am reminded there is always searching to do. The rest of Wright’s poem suggests this:

One March, four of us searched for the house of a friend in the northwestern Colorado, we searched for the early hours of a misty Good Friday—a well-lit cross atop one of the mountains. We finally found the house, stalked it like the story we were told of the black bear that reached its deft/daft? paw inside a kitchen window and cupboard and stole the peanut butter and the chocolate. We did not find our friend and stole nothing but the view. We might have been listening to Dylan as we headed toward Denver and the poor car (Kansas to Southern Utah and back in six days) cried out and died on I-70 near Golden. Two of us spent the rest of Good Friday at a bus station in Denver and all of [not-so]Holy Saturday on a Greyhound bus, arriving in Kansas City before the sun rose on Easter morning. We did not attend the Triduum services, but what we searched, saw, and survived was very much a religious experience. As a result of which I am richer, and that makes these words ring the louder and longer:

“And your gravity fails / And negativity don’t pull you through…”

but

“Tonight, some miracle will happen somewhere, it always does.”