Homage to Lester Flatt

David Bottoms

Troublesome waters I'm fearing no more...

Five seasons without traveling to a festival, without walking
into a field and hearing that voice.

And now after a long spell of rain, I step off my porch
and walk toward the river,
remembering the last time I saw Lester Flatt,
how thin he looked and sick
as he sat back in a lawn chair under the slouching pines
of Lavonia, Georgia,
and scribbled his name on the jackets of records.

How do the roots chord, Lester?
And the click beetle and the cricket, the cicada, the toad,
what harmonies do they sing in the high grass?

All of those voices
want me to praise your remarkable voice-

Tonight little sparks are winking in the fields, and the dead
are combing the edge of the forest, their arms
full of campfires.
Tonight the dead are building a stage under a funeral tent
and blowing the dust off banjos.
Tonight, for you, the dead are shaking the worms
from their ears.

Lester, singing whatever we want to about the dead
is the easiest thing in the world.
Believing it the hardest.

So this is where I stop, in this wet grass.
This is the river we're all troubled by, where the storm
 wash
rattling the bank echoes the tenor of our lives.