Vexation Lullaby

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See the man on stage. He’s been called a genius, a lovable misanthrope, a national treasure, a fraud. The backlights make a halo of his famously unruly hair — a well-known poet, his former lover, called it “a pubic pompadour.” For five decades he played the enfant terrible; now, at seventy, he is suddenly ancient. While the final note of “Last Second Coming” snakes through the crowd, he steps forward. The upturned toe of a cowboy boot juts over the black edge. He’s a statue begging to be toppled.

The audience members — he calls them his “bloodthirsty attendants”—try to steady him with their piercing concentration. They owe him everything. After all, he’s the one who urged them to leave the dead-end towns where their parents raised them. When they drove from here to there, he rode shotgun, through the purple night, beneath the magnesium sun. When they were careful, when they were conventional, he sang to the reckless selves inside them. If not for him, would they have believed in the righteous joy of heartache? Never. His lyrics and his likeness are inked beneath their skin. Clever allusions serve as the basis for their children’s names and the passwords on their Roth IRAs. Their wills instruct that “Wayward Satellite”1 play as their bodies are lowered into the raw earth.

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