Crossroads

Buddy Guy watches Jonny Lang
play a traditional constipated blues face solo.

Buddy Guy watches Ronnie Wood sliding, slinging,
posing wide armed at the end of his bars.

Buddy Guy praises them both
as he steps to the microphone:

“I don’t know how you feel
but I feel like I’m in Heaven.”

As for me, I feel like I’m seventeen again,
the age I was the first time I saw Buddy Guy

with Junior Wells: Junior all menace
and black leather, briefcase full of harps

not meant for Heaven; Buddy a benevolent
living example of why not everyone

needed a meeting at the crossroads
to tap into the Source. Still got it, too: that smile,

soft as a backwater in August. Those hands,
coaxing out a steady rain. I feel like

I’m in Heaven after having been mistreated
as he lays me to rest.