The Groove

We handed over the house and all our rights. For the crows had gathered in a congress of molting, black feathers and happy lice to hail the tyrant and the death of progress.

Caustic caws signaled the crowning feast. Fetid with power, beak filed, King

Crow sank talons into the nation’s fabric. Then, all took flight, the state of the union in tow.

Bits of the common dropped by the wayside as the greedy birds cruised the sky. What use amendments? What’s the loss of a few rights? It’s the law of victory: the untaxed rich get a free ride.

Shredding, shedding our democracy into oil-inky skies, somewhere south of the border, crows caw and sing over cages, barbed wire fences, lost children’s cries, seeding their dung, scattering woe on blighted wing.

With antebellum joy, Jefferson and Robert E. Lee sang “Dixie” while Detroit burned, the sick died, and Louisiana sank into the sea. Columbus sailed his three yachts into New York harbor. No one saw the clocks roll back or watched the crows soar.

T h e G r o o v e

We can tell we’re obsessed with a particular song when the needle on our record player scratches its way across worn vinyl grooves, jumping off path, forging a short-cut through the song, skipping bars and words, inserting a forced sonic gap like the loss of a rotten front tooth. Caught, as we often are, in an altered state induced by deafening decibels, sound waves pulsing like a supernova in a space-time continuum where the percussive beat sets the rhythm inside as well as outside our bodies, soaking through our porous white skin, rebounding within our hermetically sealed rooms, more than one of us, we solitary dancers stumble in riotous, frenetic, jerky, idiosyncratic gyrations, stunned by the scritchscratch disruption in our bliss, miles from, and oblivious to, other beats and beatings.

It’s no less disconcerting to hear Led Zeppelin’s guitar riff on an endless loop, needle caught, like flotsam on a low tide, over and over the same trilling

notes, the same lyrical phrase, echo after echo of John singing his plaintive

Julia or blasting Revolution, or Paul stuck, like an entire generation, on

Yesterday. Sound engineers, we wrestle with dust jams, polishing waxy grooves, flicking microscopic dirt from diamond-hard needles. Readers of the labyrinth of material sound, we resettle the balance and swing the arm over the slick black landscape of the album to the last path taken. After an initial scratch or plunk, holding our breath, we wait to be carried off on the smooth voices of our musical gurus, the instrumental virtuosity of our heavy-metal gods, and the poetic verses and verities of our heart-stopping idols, to transcend the glitchy, botched stage of our adolescent lives, the gritty acne of our hormonal skin, the aching loneliness and stunning awkwardness of bodies in transit

to get unstuck from the worn tracks of our grooved, tumultuous, 1960s lives, to smooth away the nightly tally of deaths in Vietnam, black bodies arms locked on the bridge, students crumpled and bleeding on college campuses, the drained faces of Kennedys, King, and Malcom X, cities on fire and people ablaze.