Bruce Bond

Hendrix

Listen to Bruce Bond read his piece:

And in those final moments as he played
with fire, remember the thread he poured,
clear as music, over his paisley Strat.
Remember how he knelt to coax the static:
a stunt, he would admit, and it worked,
the way fire works to make us talk.
It destroyed a perfectly good guitar,
the kind boys covet, to lead us, where?
into spectacle, smoke, less than smoke.
The genius of the young is how they grow
younger as we age. The day the sun
devours the earth, history is no heaven.
More of a film lodged in its projector.
Just like fire to eat the memory of fire,
the body drowned in wine the morning after.
If it’s true, that death is a mother,
if all we own begins where it ends,
in silence, which is the greater flame, the thing
that embodied us, or the song it sings.

Bruce Bond is the author of nine published books of poetry, most recently Choir of the Wells: A Tetralogy (Etruscan, 2013), The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (LSU, 2008). His books The Other Sky (poems in collaboration with the painter Aron Wiesenfeld, Etruscan), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU), and Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan) are forthcoming. He is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.