April 12, 1915–December 17, 1975

Hound Dog once confessed:
I can’t play shit, but I sure make it sound good.
Others just said he played the hell out’ that guitar.
Yes, it’s true the hell was played out
of his guitar on the daily—along with five hundred miles
of barbed wire wind whistle, a murder
of crow caws, twenty pounds of brass-knuckle
jangles, and forty acres of midnight cricket song.
When he dragged the holler of his humbucker
through wire and magnified coil, folks swore
they’d heard the muffled motor rumbles of seven
funeral cars, the spinning chambers
of eleven .44s and a mother’s murmured-up prayers
echoed off plaster-cast praying hands.
In short, he slid metal on string till the devil
got tickled and laughed up the Blues.

Born a polydactyl, his twelve fingers
flayed the six-string till one night
he freed himself of his right hand’s
sixth nub. Sawed it off drunk
on something loaded
with more proof than sense.
Each boogie he played held a secret
line dance for the sacrificial digit,
its spirit hovering up in the stratosphere
somewhere with his howl.
In a distant forest,
the monument to his reckless
fretwork rustles in the treetops
and hums with beehives
like the watts in a worn, weary amp
burning, crackling for release.