1.

The neighbor painter sang
“Stagger Lee” to us
when we were kids.

One night
he got drunk
and shot all his canvases,
not with a .44
but a 12-gauge;
shot up the garage
too. 

Cops came and took him away
still singing,

“My Daddy was Stagger Lee.
This is my Daddy’s hat.
Sheriff you son of a bitch,
lay off my Daddy’s hat.
I’m my father’s son.
He shot Billy the Lion.
All these paintings look like Billy.
Daddy talked about him all the time.
Daddy could see him in his sleep.
Sumbitch haunted him till he stopped breathing.
I grew up second string to that dead sumbitch,
I had to kill him.
Did it for my Daddy —
my Daddy was Stagger Lee.”

They shoved him hard
into the cruiser.
The moon was yellow,
the leaves
came tumbling down. 

2.

There is a voice in old songs
that will not shut up,

that seeps into new songs
like black water.

3.

Bulldogs today bark
the same way
they did back then.

A stiff Stetson brim
still holds its shape
through a lot of abuse.

Stagger’s got a lot of kids
and it’s no accident that “Stagger”
rhymes with “swagger.”

4.

My daddy’s Stagger Lee.
He taught me how to flow.
He taught me how to party
and taught me how to blow.

My daddy was a lion.
He taught me to die.
He taught me how to party
like it’s 1999.

We sing it like it’s gospel
that a gun will show the truth.
We’ve been losing the melody.
We’ve been losing our youth.

My daddy is a hero.
My daddy’s Stagger Lee.
If you thought he was a pistol
then get a load of me.

5.

My neighbor painted nothing
but dark landscapes
and rattletrap barrooms.
In every landscape there was a stream,
in every barroom was a hat,
and in every painting there was a figure
with its back turned,
facing into a corner
or staring at a hanging tree.

My neighbor was a good painter,
and he made a lot of good art
on that long ago night,
using the muzzle of a shotgun
to lift the veil over the long trail
back to 1889 and the St. Louis bar
where two men arguing over politics
put themselves on the hit parade
forever and their names
became odd little signifiers for
something: a black spring tapped
and rising, bubbling up,  a story of
no law but the law of opposites
clashing and melting into one another
to create a myth that’s still soaking
into the pocket
of every man who keeps an automatic
at the ready in case the song
needs to be sung again.

Stagger Lee didn’t swing
for killing Billy in either
real life or the song. He didn’t swing
in the paintings either;

the trees remained nothing but trees,

and the leaves are the only thing
that ever came tumbling down.

Is it any wonder
people still sing that song?