Jimmy Buffett
       

I know what people say. He's tacky, bad.
The musical equivalent of lime-a-rita
in a light-up souvenir cup. He brings to mind
American tourists trudging drunk
over foreign shores with the shores of their shoulders
fried with freckles, the smell of a roach

extinguished in an overwatered potted plant.
But when I hear his songs, I think instead
of how my father got home from work
just as my mother was putting my brother and me
to bed. He waited outside the bedroom door

while she prayed, and most nights we could barely keep
our eyes open to tell him how our days went,
already tucked in and tuckered out
in our bunks. But sometimes we were still awake

and asked him for a lullaby. My father didn't know
any lullabies. So he gave us other songs,
songs from his youth—from memories of amphitheaters,
weed smog hovering over rowdy crowds
as Jimmy Buffett half slurred, half shouted
over the din of steel drums and off-key horns—

and so softly my father would begin to sing
"A Pirate Looks at Forty," omitting the verse
in which the speaker admits to having been drunk
for a week and pissing himself in his sleep
in some vague alley in some vague seaside city.

I can see the city. Neon signs all salt-burned,
sticky-floored rum huts, sidewalks strewn with cigarettes,
and all the buildings look like cigarettes
burning from the inside out. My father has his share

of drunken stories, and I do too. At different times,
we both woke up on the floor wrapped in wet towels
and bath mats with our heads feeling like fish bowls

full of boiling. The song isn't a lullaby. It's a dirge.
Sometimes the person I want to be
feels as far away as a locked chest rotting
in the throat of some impossible abyss.
But sometimes I drive through overbuilt beach towns

full of pastel hotels and glaring chain restaurants and Buffett's songs
come on the radio and in spite of everything
they make me smile. I know the words by heart.

Tweet

Copyright © 2021 Andrew Hemmert All rights reserved
from Sawgrass Sky
Texas Review Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission