My dear friend Tom has hours. We are all sitting vigil from different time zones. Tom took me into the folk world, introduced me to people he wanted me to know, people who he wanted to hear my music. He invited me to play songs in song circles populated by the best. He thought I was one of the best. We shared songs under star-filled skies for many years at midnight at The Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. I stayed at he and Cary’s home in Dallas many times. We wrote a lot of songs together. We cried together when I had a break up and then when he and Cary split up. We rarely called each other but when we’d see each other we’d start in as the conversation had left off. Tom was like the centerpiece to my world in the folk scene. Too many, actually. He had a way of making everyone feel welcome. I have the tattoo I write about below, ever reminding me of my friend. I can’t fathom a world without Tom. But, as he said to Cary tonight, “It’s all going to be ok”. Here’s a poem a wrote to him tonight.
Satya
To Tom Prasada-Rao
My son says the tree branches swing
with the weight of the leaves, fingers
reaching down toward the soil, littered
with cicada carcasses, which, in time,
will decompose like bone into earth.
Which all things do in time. Time
is so strange. How do we measure
the right time for anything?
We have Hackberries here. Tall thick
trunks shooting up from shallow
graves. They fly the tornado skies
in the Spring, when the winds come.
I see branches reaching to the stars,
not bowing their heads
toward the graveyards. I see
the long life of the fragile tree, the short
life of the cicadas as the same time--
between the dawn and the dark.
What I’m trying to say, my friend,
is that I love you.
You named me for my fragility. Destroyer
in the name of Truth. Over time, my world
beginning and ending, and ending and
beginning as I reached for love and failed
each time.
But you said time means
nothing to the sun.
I tattooed the name by which
you call me on my wrist, the
thinnest skin on an arm. It hurt.
It will hurt when you raise your arms
and dance like the Hackberry, a
tornado of sound and light.