Ryan Tullis


For Wes Montgomery


Old Black Guitarist




He played the fifties
on the bump of his thumb
(though the balloon of
skin's vanished by now).


"Force of will," a recording guitarist
said to me in passing, but I
still bobbed my head under his vinyl
wings. 


The blur, that palm on a
palm, beating steel into Barcelona
still thumps in my (and his) sleep.


Officianados called it a jazz-box;
I call it a coffin.