Rick Campbell: James Dickey Said

You have the hands of a piano player
and I said, yes, I play harmonica. He
laughed, said of course, and moved
on through the reception.
 
In a Laramie bar
by the railroad tracks
our band played nights 
under a sky wide and high, 
stars shining like a score 
 
on the black sheets of heaven. 
My hands fluttered, measured 
the air it takes to bend a note 
into the blue night stars.
 
There was no piano player 
but when a freight rumbled through
the band left me to play wheels 
on the tracks and a whistle 
lost in the mountains west. 

Rick Campbell is a poet and essayist living on Alligator Point, Florida. His latest collections of poems are Gunshot, Peacock, Dog. (Madville Publishing, 2018) and Provenance (Blue Horse, 2020).

Copyright © 2020 by Rick Campbell. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and Blue Horse Press.