tracy and i are going to start playing with the prose poem and this is a throat clearing

Jimmy Martin, King of Bluegrass

Today I am wearing on my shirt the face of a musician who is dead. I have never heard the invisible chords of his blue grass break sound into the new word, which means joy in sadness or sadness in joy. A displaced ancestor falls from the family tree, his love of banjo imprinted on a gene now notated, unalterably, in the pattern of my body. The air vibrates. On my shirt the musician's face is a negative, his sensory organs gently blank. His undepicted fingers pluck until outside thunder bursts like a rolling barrel in the sky, and the song becomes rain that washes everything away. The bright flash of lightning is electricity halting the car on its way to Boulder; is the tornado warning crackling in the gulley between two towns named for long-dead settlers; is the white light of the afterlife; is the sharpened knife-gleam of forgetting I carry in my mind from break-of-day to fizzle. Is itself: lightning, illuminating the Bloomington sky. My hand goes to my heart, conceals the musician's face. Presses him into my chest as if to mark my skin. To record imagined music, memory that never was.