Picking a bone with Bob Dylan
after Sally Wen Mao
Brittany Ober
I infiltrate while he’s mixing Highway 61 Revisited.
This is 1965; the band is camped out in Woodstock,
and the speakers play back a demo in a wood-paneled basement:
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Bob smirks, self-satisfied;
we’ve been lost in the same country, surrounded
by invisible alebrijes that guide our dream-selves,
quasi-Mexicans, through cities we wish we’d been
born in. But, I press him, his cerulean eyes rolling.
He clams up after I insist, “There’s no Rue Morgue Avenue
down there.” He silently pulls the collar of his leather jacket
higher. Later, at dinner, it’s storming. The house has lost
electricity. Bob finally gives in, admitting he wasn’t really
paying prostitutes in Juarez. He was just jacked
on amphetamines and made use of that speedy bravado
to accuse Sweet Melinda and she takes your voice and leaves
you howling at the moon. Only he knows the depravity
of his own devices—painting a poor woman
puta, earning street cred for venturing forth in Chihuahua
as a single white man, high on hallucinogens. But I still like
how he sang himself paralyzed, mind on fire, in a hotel room
or lost and chilled to the bone in the rain. How he amputates
my ear drums and fills them with blackmail and burgundy!
Violent lightning bisects the semidarkness through the window,
illuminating the roast chicken and leeks. I call him “liar.”
He shouts, “poet!” We leap up simultaneously; chairs
crash into table and a precarious wine glass shatters. Bob takes
a swing, and I slam his bony body into that wood-paneled wall.
My finger hits his hard sternum; I swear I feel it crack, but
perhaps it’s just his maniacal laugh cutting through
that cavernous room. He won’t recite poems after this; even
in the haze of this alcohol-soaked, candlelit basement, I cannot
imagine him kissing, me, Melinda, or anyone else. And if he did,
he’d shut his eyes tighter than a safe pad-locked in a chest
sealed in a time capsule buried in the ground in some imaginary
cuidad where he lives on an unmarked street. He asks me to help him
stand, but we’re both pretty drunk by now. I whisper in his ear,
“I’m from the future where your words are dissected
like bodies. Really radical surgery.” “Then let ‘em cut it
all up into nothin’.” He’s back in character, but his eyes
hint he’s sorry. “She really did try to rip my tongue right outta
my mouth,” he laughs. I embrace him, so young
and exhausted. I hold him in to prevent disintegration. I can
forgive him, but I hope Melinda will keep his voice
forever, let him continue to cry for the moon,
which has disappeared behind the torrential
downpour of this ever-repeating tormenta.
Brittany Ober teaches at the American Language Program at Columbia University. Her chapbook Easy Beat was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2010. Her poetry has been published in Canteen, Gutter Eloquence, and wicked alice and is forthcoming in Breadcrumbs and Ample Remains. She lives in (and loves) Queens, New York.