TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction I If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day Me and the Devil Blues I’m a Steady Rolling Man Crossroads Blues Little Boy Blue They’re Red Hot Phonograph Blues Malted Milk Blues II Stones in My Passway Stop Breaking Down Dead Shrimp Blues Hellhound on My Trail Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil) Honeymoon Blues 32-20 Blues Little Queen of Spades III Rambling on My Mind Mr. Downchild Walking Blues Come Take A Little Walk With Me Drunken-Hearted Man Kindhearted Woman Blues Last Fair Deal Gone Down IV When You Got a Good Friend Terraplane Blues Come on in My Kitchen V Coda: Love in Vain

“Caviare—the kind made from blackeyed peas, of course—to the general, these poems!” —Richard Howard  “[In these duets,] I feel a fearlessness, a nakedness, at once breathtaking and courageous. In that may lie the secret, should there be one: to discover, to pursue, that which compels us, galvanizes, obsesses.” —Herbert Morris “With the refreshing and uncanny empathy for which she is admired and respected as a critic and poet, Blakely offers a fresh attention to Johnson’s music (her poems take their titles from his extraordinary compositions), . . . allowing the various, often contradictory cries of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters—across time, race, art form, and culture—to erupt through her own.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, “Arts & Academe,” Chronicle of Higher Education “For years, Blakely has written what she calls ‘duets’ with Robert Johnson: her poems visiting his songs, his songs breathing in her poems. [In “Dead Shrimp Blues,” with comment by Spaar], she has Tennessee Williams and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof cross paths with the blues singer in Clarksdale, Mississippi, so she can address him directly, circling around the imagery in one of at least two Johnson songs built around a metaphor for impotence. She writes like a window-peeper: ‘I’ll undress / Down to my humid white-girl slip.’ Spaar follows the way Blakely’s words curl around Johnson’s until it can seem as if Johnson’s are curling around hers; she rescues the phrase ‘posted out’ from the murk of Johnson’s song so you can hear it crack in Blakely’s.” —Greil Marcus, “Real Life Rock Top Ten,” The Believer "She believed in le mot juste, in measure and music, was a master of the sonnet and villanelle, but also experimented with a longer, wilder line and worked for many years on a still unpublished book, Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson, which may well prove the ultimate white southerner’s poem that attempts to cross the great racial divide, join the chamber band to the blues ensemble, and, in a direct political sense, enact an aesthetic and cultural unity." —Rodney Jones

Advance review copies to major literary media, online blogs and other social media. co-op available friends of the poet will host memorial readings in several cities ads in Rain Taxi and other periodicals

IF I HAD POSSESSION OVER JUDGMENT DAY Enough of God. Enough of witnesses. O turn your face to the room’s wall And sing, poor Bob. O sing damnation past drawn shades More cracked with light than mine. Bowls fill With melting ice; fan blades shift, dangerous In the choked air. A man’s brought you to Texas, Twice, to needle songs—I went To the mountain, looked as far as my eyes could see— On waxy plates. Brought you a pint, And let’s drink to that first crowd’s sweaty laughs, Also your last girlfriend’s. O vengeful solo: You didn’t like the way she done And swore she’d have no right to pray. Tears prick my throat As if you’d damned me too, as one Who makes her songs from scaredy-cat bravado And flirts with others’ dues. Enough of love— Aren’t we both vagrants of the South, You born from autumn trysts, black knees splayed in high cotton; I from a history of shut mouths And families gone? Lead me beyond the eaves Of sleeping women’s shacks, where you once stayed Till dawn, your fingers muting still The knife-edged chords that beckon toward a possessed heart . . . Mine’s followed you to Texan hell, Though walls melt down to echoes as you play And curse God’s vast shining back: don’t throw me out. Here’s another pint. Another hymn From a white girl whose call craves your response, shades drawn Against false stars . . . Trouble gon’ come: Lead me, like whiskey and wept judgments, down. ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES And he said Bastard. He said Mama’s Boy. You said you hated chopping cotton, the sun Above your head like God’s hot blinding eye. You hated greens and your stepfathers too. You loved your Sears and Roebuck harp, and wire You’d strung along the shack’s unpainted door, The wire you plucked until your fingers bled. Me and the Devil was walking side by side, You sang once your first wife—Virginia—died, And your first baby too. You hated blood. You hated blood unless it slow-pulsed tunes Inside your cotton-headed dreams. Or varnished The guitar that Satan tuned one night, the moon Above your head like God’s cold blinding eye. Me and the Devil was walking side by side, You sang when love had mixed with the road’s dirt, The dirt that was your love’s address; I’m gon’ To beat my woman till I get satisfied. And then you said Alone Alone Alone. The Devil smiled and asked Who loves you best? I’M A STEADY ROLLING MAN Almost in Kentucky, the state that gave My country ’tis of thee two armored foes Named Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis, who rolled Both night and day to let their people go, The Fugitives, with rhyming grave, Exalted a post-bellum woe For yeoman farms plowed red by Scalawags. I’m the man that rolls when icicles hang On the tree, you hitched rides here to sing, and moaned So even dead Confederates knew your slang And called for an encore. Their flag Still flies from pick-up trucks adorned With gun racks and, on chilly autumn nights, Trussed, jacklighted deer. Some drivers went To one country funeral to lift beer cans To their hard workin’, steady rollin’ friend And—maybe—Ku Kluxer Knights, Who never bought the farm or banned Their own, in town called Rednecks and White Trash Since long before moth-speckled porches shined And girls bought their first radios. You can’t Give your sweet woman ev’thing she wants at one time And men know this, and o these relished Darkness plowed with bullets’ steely tint But heard no classmate sing from that crashed truck, Nor his young wife’s duet. O Dixie’s pride Still croons Nigger, still sings the Klan reborn In last century’s flamed youth; and there’s no rhyme For gelding knives, nor Emmett Till, Whose boy’s voice in a country store Bragged Chicago, where he had white girlfriends: She gets ramblin’ in her brain, other men On her mind. More rope. A gin wheel. Don’t look away From fugitives, you and the murdered man Just might agree. And his black friends, Now jailed, like you sing They and We. CROSSROADS BLUES What’s present tense but delta mud, dark roux That Southern girls, when knee-high, learn to choke From high-heeled mothers halved by pink aprons? O love, o trainwreck, o half-rhyming heart . . . I’ve tried to flag a ride home; to swill bourbon— The family’s première divorcée—till, drunk As the sky’s riotous, moon-tangled kudzu, I swallowed pardons for my scissored assaults On vested suits and silk ties in his closet, The tendrils slithering floorward like snakes, like Dark faithless vines. I believe I’m sinkin’ down . . . And yet I’ve heard the Devil waits at crossroads For ma’ams who’ve crawled through gumbo mud and men To let him tune their guitar strings—don’t look— Then pledge their sweet-talk to the deep bruised blues Till it’s last call for good. O stubborn heart, O Ashley Wilkes, o flirtations with moons As dully gold as wedding bands. Whose pillow Did my half-groomed head share before I woke In this dawn’s silted light? His white boys’ tunes Were drifting from my kitchen’s pink-stained heart. The rising sun goin’ down, if not tomorrow. LITTLE BOY BLUE Faint echoes rise from graves. Full moon, midnight. Your teacher, Ike, last played in Alabama. Little Boy Blue, please come blow your horn: You listen, turn his new song round and round. O turn it round then finger those harsh dates Carved into rock. Into wood crosses, slanted On this flood plain down by the western tracks The boxcars gulp, rattling through kudzu Like a giant snake. Please come blow your horn, Ike sings, but history shakes with louder sounds As midnight turns back into blood-moist drama And you can almost hear the river, torn By mortar fire. Does Ike hear it too? You’ve both jumped trains to Vicksburg, its bluffs high And ruined with the shelled townhomes of planters, The broken columns veiled in river-mist Like this, mist white as a hoop-skirt, or shroud. O dig your fingers deep, o turn them round Till you see gunboats, see besieged families crawl From caves carved into mud, swapping mad fists Over hardtack and rat meat. O see men fall And see them march, most uniformed in blue— Come blow your horn—till you echo God’s hiss And dead slaves’ laughter, shaking dirt-chained bones.