By Kate Fox

“The best line of iambic pentameter is not in classical
poetry but in W. C. Handy’s ‘St. Louis Blues.’”
—Elizabeth Bishop

Let me end this song on a not-so-minor note,
rest my head on this 1926 Gibson, sing goodbye

to every lyric I have ever learned: the one about the boat
that can carry two and the lonesome picker, the one

about how Louise rode home on the mail train
and how walking is most too slow. And, of course,

the one about riding down the canyon that, even after
forty years, recalls my father on a Saturday night

wrapping the fingers of his left hand with adhesive tape,
swaying and slapping an upright bass in some

small-town dance hall while my mother waltzes
across a floor strewn with corn meal, and my brother

and I fall asleep among coats piled high on folding chairs
against the wall. He once told me music was the one thing

he could count on, married, as he was, in 1929,
his first child, a girl, born and buried a year later,

a life of lung trouble that finally sent him out West
to either die or get well. At thirty, I took him

at his word, picked up the guitar he gave me,
the one around whose neck he wrapped my fingers,

and taught me songs that survive on breath alone:
how the water is wide, how I won’t be worried long,

how I hate to see that evening sun go down.

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Kate Fox is the author of two chapbooks of poems: The Lazarus Method (Kent State University Press) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in Great River Review, The Kenyon Review, and Pleiades. She earned her Ph.D. from Ohio University, where she worked as an instructor, editor, and assistant to the president. She lives in Athens, Ohio, with her partner, Bob DeMott, and their English setter, Katie.