Courtesy of Willa
After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary
Something happens to the road when your eyes are filled with tears. It rises up before you, as though two paths have appeared, one beneath your wheels, and the one that exists above the asphalt and gravel, the one that only some can see. I saw that road in the late hours of the night, driving home from a graveyard where my hero had been laid to rest, his ashes neatly boxed and buried just inches beneath the grass and snow, the stone that would one day bear his name still absent. The air was electric and cold, the way atmosphere feels only in places of the dead. Yet, graveyards are for the living. The dead, like Jackson, have better things to do than hang about in graveyards. And Jackson had spent enough of his life in a box. He was somewhere far more beautiful and warm than under that snowy ground. Yet, there I knelt for a long moment playing Jimi Hendrix, my knees cold and wet on the frozen earth as I sought to ease the ache.
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
Days bleed together, life returns to as it was before he was gone. Yet there is this dark space in the world where once he stood, glaring with every passing day, a reminder that a once bright light is gone. The coals left by a fire as bright as Jackson cinder forever, just as fiercely as the flame that bore them, waiting beneath the ash long after the fire is forgotten, ready to be brought alight once more.
He suffered, many will say. Cursed by a migraine that lasted for seven years, wandering the world religiously clad in sunglasses to curb his epilepsy, living with an infection that wouldn’t heal – he spent his final years in dis-ease, as though like Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil for mastery of the strings, Jackson sold his health for talent long before he’d touched the guitar or the paintbrush. His paints had all dried as his eyes failed him, too traumatized by migraines to maintain focus on the canvas. Perhaps that was when his spirit chose to trade this Jalopy of a body in for a newer model, something that could contain the fury of his spirit without crumpling in its wake.
The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary
I never knew how to speak to him when he was here, that’s how desperately I looked up to him. I was afraid to have silence in the conversation, afraid to bore him with my inane prattling. Now, if I had the chance to be heard by him for but a moment, I would pour out my heart with the fury of a dam futily holding back the biblical flood. I never knew how to talk to the man, a single person that touched the world like lightning striking down in an open field. I knew his glory, I sang his praises to anyone who would listen, but I only learned how much I wanted him to hear my praise when he no longer could. He was an architect of who I am. He was one of the only voices who could speak reason when I refused to hear. In the quiet hours after his voice was taken away, I can finally hear what he said.
There are some who say your heart breaks when you lose someone that means that much to you. I pity those people, because my heart is invincible for having known him.
When the wind whispered his name, he answered. When in my ripe old age I hear it calling mine, I pray the voice be his.
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it’s old age, and it’s wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary
