The Color of Dirt

The way the dusty roads

south of Memphis and West Memphis

on the Arkansas and Mississippi 

sides of the delta

seem to run for hundreds of miles 

between cotton fields and rice fields, 

never more than a dozen miles 

from the river 

makes ordinary roads songs 

bleach out like pastel paintings 

left in the sun. 

Old Ford trucks with vent windows 

and no ac cry out 

for Graceland and Emmylou and Iris Dement 

and Fats Domino singing his lost soul out 

Walking to New Orleans

The shabby old farm houses 

and tumbledown trailers

all painted the shade of dust

behind tractors running and broken down

Those big ole two cylinder 

John Deeres idling

sounding like firecrackers

popping off in ice cream churns

while the men sit on the porch 

smoking cigarettes

for the last five minutes of lunch

Like the houses, 

the people are the color 

of the delta dirt, 

neither white nor black, 

though they will certainly claim 

to be one or the other.