Substantiation

The sheriff says it wasn’t Till we pulled from the river,

that man was as white as I am, white as cotton

blowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down,

looked like he’d lain there weeks, not a kid at all.

He was a stranger just out of Money, recalled

by a store clerk, a hobo, and a crossroad guitarist.

The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing.

They say it’s like the sheriff says, came up one night,

headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down,

right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says,

a plague of starlings gathered into little boys

those who fished and found the dead man’s foot.

The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes.

He cannot find them, no matter where he looks

~

The sheriff says this man’s killer is on the loose

and a killer emerges, a child watching from a sleeping porch

catches a rustle in the bushes and soon everyone

is on the hunt while in the courtroom someone

is wondering about this poor murdered’s family,

who’s missing him, and the next day his father appears

unknown for work, his name on the payroll,

then gets to work at a machine no one’s ever seen,

and someone is weeping on the Tallahatchie’s bank,

a little girl who wished her mother would die

whose mother died at the hands of this stranger

she’s followed till he stepped in the river and disappeared.

~

~

~

They say it was darker than a thousand midnights

in the cabin, that they couldn’t find him in the dark.

They say that Moses brought him out at last,

that someone else was in the truck to say

that it was him that did the talk at Money.

They say they took him for a ride, to rough him up,

scare him on a river bluff then let him go.

They say they let him off near Glendora

never seen again. They say Aint it like a negro

to swim the river with a gin fan round his neck.

They say it was hog’s blood in the truck

what Too Tight washed. They say

they never burnt no shoes, it was a barbecue.

They say that Too Tight never worked for them,

never heard of Willie Reed. They say they never meant

to harm the boy, that they didn’t do a thing.

~

~

In the nervous ward, Reed remembers Milam with the gun

asking did he hear anything. Reed remembers saying no,

he didn’t hear anything, anything. Remembers not hearing

the beating and the crying in the shed behind Milam’s.

Remembers not thinking, they beatin’ somebody up there.

Remembers not passing the shed, not hearing the beating.

Remembers not remembering Milam not coming out,

not asking if he’d heard. Remembers not

not remembering on the stand, not not whispering

the court reporter not not recording his not

not remembered memory. Not not getting on the train.

Not hearing anything, anything. Such quiet now.

~

~