Goodnight Irene
If Irene turns her back on me,
I’m gonna take morphine and die.
—Huddie Ledbetter
On my fourth birthday, she’s scooping coal gravel
Into the kitchen stove to keep a good fire
For cupcakes when the song comes over her
By way of the table top radio she loves.
She drops the small shovel, filling the kitchen air
With shiny black dust, grabs my hands and we waltz
Circles across dark linoleum to the sweet
Weavers’ version of the tune. My birthday doll’s
Eyes are flat green buttons
Tacked on with embroidery thread, her nose
Two black French knots, and her mouth
A wide, straight, cross-stitched line.
Who could love a thing like that? My mother says
Everything wants to be loved, and I name
The strange cloth doll Goodnight Irene.
She’s baked a dime into one cupcake and a penny
Into each of the others, so we eat carefully,
Chewing as if we expect to be hurt. Halfway through,
I bite on silver, spit it into her hand and smile,
Believing in my own good luck.
I wouldn’t hear Leadbelly’s own mournful voice
Sing his song for many years, until after
My father is finally gone,
After the doll has been torn to pieces
By a neighbor’s dog, and my mother has burned
What was left with the trash. In this kitchen,
My grandfather stands under the light, brushing
My grandmother’s thin, white hair, her head tilted
Slightly forward, lap full of the blue tablecloth
She believes she is mending. One of them is humming,
And I realize for the first time that it’s the man
In the song who is desperate for love—it’s the man
Who threatens suicide and promises
To get the girl in his dreams—and it occurs to me
That I have never seen anyone
Brush my mother’s hair, and I understand
How I began to know heartbreak
All those years ago, by the way
My mother sang along.
Connie Hales
from Separate Escapes, The Ashland Poetry Press
