If somebody has died on you, be careful of the best.
Don’t listen to Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers.
All the lyrics are about the importance of death in any kind
of actual life.
It is the music of every sort of ambiguity.
There is embarrassment there and professionalism.
David Blair is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays. His newest book True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021 is now available from MadHat Press. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and he teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire.