"Tintype."
I'm from Texas originally.
I spent a part of my childhood in the Piney Woods of East Texas
with my mother's mother.
I love those Piney Woods.
They're dangerous and deep.
They're beautiful and haunting.
My Aunt Tinny was a blues singer.
This is called "Tintype--
Thunderstorm in Palestine, Texas, 3:00 PM."
Tin roof, ten teeth, three gold, as if from a tin pan
in a slow creek, drawing mud, calling up catfish
from the muck, and that skinny man, Aunt Tinny's man,
never married, married man.
He's got his head thrown back.
Eyes closed for his daily claim--
the way she pulls the hurt right out of him,
like a long-splinter whose release almost feels good.
Real good.
He cooks but doesn't eat.
Doesn't need anything but what he took years back and keeps
shacked in front of him.
A woman tinned her own cans back there, back then,
and burned trash in the backyard.
You think I don't know who I am?
Tin-tonguing the gap between there--
listening with my hands stuck to my chest and the ring
shout of my own feet-- and now.
"Tin cutter.
Just like me" to hear Tinny tell it.
Once you've sat on that sweat-stained couch,
pot-liquor spotted, love-marked cushions frayed to failing,
and listened to her pound the upright's keys,
some tan and half-rotted, black.
Barely standing, and the bench barely able
to hold her tin-haired self, you won't be right.
She'll mess you up if you stay too long, tin man.
That wail wrapping its arms around you,
its legs like a weighted trap.
You'll cry for your mother.
You'll cry like you've never cried before. 'Course you will.
Taking in what can't be taken in.
Won't matter who you were.
If you listen, she'll give it to you anyway,
your heart rolled in her mouth, ten-times the measure,
over days like one long road of night, cold and hard as hail."
[APPLAUSE]