A Poem in Three Parts About Johnny Cash
If I only knew you loved me too
I’d still be there.
-Johnny Cash “I’d Still Be There”
I
Johnny Cash is Hypnotized
Johnny Cash told Johnny Horton that Webb Pierce
had sung him a song in a dream that he,
Johnny Cash, was supposed to have written.
But Cash could not remember all the words.
Johnny Horton hypnotized him and, from the trance,
Johnny Cash remembered all the words
to “I’d Still Be There.”.
People alive and people dead appear to each other
in visions, dreams, trances,
with messages of comfort and warning
and songs of love and loss.
This is true now and it has always been true.
II
Johnny Cash is Attacked By an Ostrich
on his animal farm at the House of Cash.
The ostrich’s mate had been killed
by a hard freeze and he was crazed with grief.
So, he attacked Johnny Cash unprovoked,
wings out, head forward, beak open, hissing.
Johnny, not one to be bullied by a bird on his own property,
took a wild swing at the ostrich with a 6-foot stick and missed.
For a second, it looked like the bird had vanished
but it turned out the ostrich leapt in a high arc
and came down on Johnny with its big lethal toe.
It would have disemboweled Johnny Cash
but for the grace of God.
Johnny Cash was left with broken ribs,
a severe laceration of the abdomen and,
then, an addiction to morphine.
III
A Spirit Leads Johnny Cash Out of a Cave
Johnny decides to crawl deep into the absolute darkness
of Nickajack Cave, a vast array of caverns in Tennessee,
to lie down and die.
He is crazed with grief because, years later,
his wife June Carter will die
and then Johnny will die a few months later,
as everyone will have predicted.
This is not the sequence in time
but it is the sequence in the heart,
in which all time collapses into a single node
somewhere among the muscles and chambers.
Those things that measure out the pulse of time–
hearts, clocks, dripping water in limestone caverns–
know nothing of time.
So Johnny crawls hopelessly far into the cave,
which holds the bones of Confederate soldiers
and generations of hell-raising teenagers
who lost their way.
And he is touched by God
and sees the light and is guided out by the Spirit
and by the faintest of breezes and a sliver of sunray.
I’d still be there, he might say,
but for the Grace of God,
which leads people into caves and then out of them.
Into deserts and then out of them.
Into love and then out of love,
Into despair and then out of despair.
–D.Wisely 9/03