Ada Limón

5 sonnets

These poems first appeared in an issue of MiPoesias in May 2008. I had just started singing with a band and all I was doing was listening to great singers that I admired (desperately wishing I could transform my own lungs into theirs). I'd lose myself for days listening to my favorite voices. Each song took me back to being a child and laying on the rug in front of my father's record player. I wanted to write something that would try and fit that feeling into a poem. In a way, they're simple fan letters, love poems, and praise to those voices that still send me reeling.

Out Loud
—For Emmylou Harris

Billow always in those open O’s
of red iron ore and fool’s gold
and hold that angel wing in your
belly of air and chord. Deep in
the giving up and here’s a ladder.
Straight up, rung by rung, sung
seemingly out of my own rusted,
chest. My six year old mouth once
pressed against your words trying
to mimic a woman’s note, not knowing
how far it had to go before it rounded
into a fist and tumbled out, guided
only by fire and the stinging fear
of being swallowed alive.

Stronger Than Dirt
—For Big Mama Thorton  

Pour all the water out crooked
dripping bullets in the bucket,
make the house shake with a throat
stomp and the body back out
like a king snake was slipped
into the water tower. Scare me
good. You’re a state bird of crimes
done on this curved land of ours,
you’re a screen door and a God’s
girl gone liquor bleak and done.
You’re when I’m the meanest,
barracked against the beatings,
some loud drum making a motor
spark some necessary sin.

La Llorona Calling
—For Chavela Vargas

Haunt me please, in the long hoof
home—my mouth mashed and
sullen from unholy lips—keep
me company with your low moan
of come here, come here, come.
Your grist filled song drowns
out the thumped-up heart
that often denies me everything
but this long cry of descent.
From the first wayward, La,
to the watery wail of Llorona,
I’m a good dog tethered again.
Weep away, I’ll come crawling
knee deep to your howl.

Sparrowing
—For Dolly Parton

Crowned the queen of molten
gold, the lost lilting river light
of Tennessee comes clean and
careening from the mountain’s
crag and leaps into you. Sister holy
and wholly sparrow blessed with
resurrected sound stuck in your maw.
You, yellow haired slack-rope
bending note maker. You, thick
skinned, tin-plated carver of twitter
and swell. Royal bird amongst
the junebugs, reign, for every firefly
songster gets her mighty charge
of tremble from your honest holler.

Hullo Sun
—For Aretha Franklin

Miles of vinyl highways spun out
and steady up we went. On a tile
floor, your first note, boiled over
and tough in its tender bends,
broke a ten year old in two. Me
there, your record aching round,
stunned and plummeted and
dunked under a sound that seized
my poor forming bird shell who
could not even dare to mouth
your silence. Me, the shaking
speaker, all my hairs like lung’s cilia
waving in a whir that I would have
gone back and begged to be born in.