To Keith Richards

by Betsy Sholl

In your bluesy slide and bent notes
I can almost smell the sweat in your headband

and hear the corn husk of your voice-enough
slurred words to suggest you speak most often

to people inside your head or between the covers
of a book. I would not leave my daughter

alone with you, even if you crawled up my stairs
on your knees reciting To be, or not….

Still, there’s something of Hamlet in you-
Horatio shaken, not stirred with Muddy Waters

and Robert Johnson and swallowed straight up.
You laugh as though every joke could mean

more than it does, and your rumpled clothes
make you look like someone who spent the night

in a Memphis archive playing every never-
released demo made by musicians so raw,

their instruments are their own battered lives.
Their pain isn’t yours. Still, your tuning,

your slide, the dirty tenor of your voice—
seems you must know what it’s like to fall.

No daughter of mine. But sometimes I think
I could get in your car and ride to lights out,

nothing left to lose, that low-down place
where starting is what comes after the end.

Shakespeare likes to leave someone on stage
to tell the story when the drama is done.

That could be you, aged out of hard living,
but always more pure than you looked,

more faithful to those backcountry blues.
And if the rest is silence, please tell me

that stiff fingers and a wrecked voice don’t matter
to the blues, they just want to be played.