The obligation of empathy requires ruthless exteriority
For perception involves fragmentation and flux
Sometimes comely sometimes hideous
In an intricate interpenetration far past duality

We are children awakening from our nap
Still in our crib fingers in our mouth
We see the light of day
But we linger unready to step into the world

When the kids were little we would go
To the media library in eastern Dekalb
To fetch back VHS tapes
Alice in Wonderland Fraggle Rock old cartoons

And I would browse the collection of vinyl LPs
I knew Folkways Records
But even on its exterior this one was different
No sharecroppers or chain gang

Some weird hybrid of a fiddle and a barometer
And within a big pamphlet
With old engravings and faux newspaper accounts
Of the content of each of like 80 songs

Dropping the needle I knew that I had struck gold
The keening voice of someone called Dick Justice
A murder and shifting speakers in dialogue including a bird
The American south touching the fifteenth century

And song after song rolled out in wonder
Some reflective of conventional virtuosity
Some rough indeed but each a thing of beauty
No autotune in those days boy howdy

And soon a lilting slide guitar
In triple meter and two voices in thirds
Another murder but this one
Ominously annotated as ritual

The melody and harmony sweet and sad
But the lyrics unbelievably fucked up
The word rain three times to insist it was a rainy day
But all the boys in our school came out to talk and play

They tossed a ball again so high then again so low
No
You don’t say again twice like that
What is wrong with these Nelstone’s Hawaiians

Recording in Atlanta trying to cash in
On the craze for Hawaiian music
The murderess a disgusting slur in the lyrics
Words and music in intolerable conflict

At the end the murdered boy issues his convoluted will
A bible first at his head and then at his feet
A testament first at his feet and then at his head
Tell my mother that I’m asleep and my father that I’m dead

The ballad of Henry Lee which opened the album
Expressed plenty of horror
A little pen knife held in her hand
She plugged him through and through

Again the female assailant
And in the real world jealousy makes madness
But what inspires a fantasy of child-murder
Done by a woman designated as foreigner in our midst

What do we do with a work of fiction
That perpetuates an abominable lie
Some call The Triumph of the Will
A great or at least a good achievement in cinema

Its harsh geometry compelling
Expressive of compulsion
In all the dire meanings of the word
All the poets are poor dumb humans

We do not see what underlies
Nor know what’s ultimate
But the one poem
Resolves all duality

It takes experience to read
But innocence can look at pictures
The tyger blazes fearfully in the text
But see the little smile on its face