Self-Portrait at Eighty with Twelve-String (Sontag)
Joplinesque -- of or pertaining to Janis Joplin
Self-Portrait at Eighty with Twelve-String, by Kate Sontag (1952-)
Out of the corner of her good eye she recognizes it
tonight on television: there it is, she’s sure of it,
her old Martin dazzling as a dozen wild yellow lilies
opening on stage in a younger woman’s arms — this guitar
home once to a spider crawling out of the center
hole, the fiberglass case unlatched after a long winter
to reveal the plush lining, this guitar that slept under
shooting stars, that arose over white water — a woman young
enough (she thinks though she never had any children)
to be her great-granddaughter with peacock feather
earrings and Joplinesque hair, who puts 5,000 miles
on her car in a week driving from Boston
up to Prince Edward Island and back in search of America —
this guitar of bald tires and all-nighters with fast
friends at the wheel, of ferryboat queues and camping out
on fragrant deserted beaches — a woman still
a girl recklessly singing in Canada at sunrise, her sleeping
bag wet from the flood time, feeling again the raw
action of silk and steel cutting octave lines
into her fingertips and the heat of a handrolled
joint being passed, the orange ashes falling too fast
on the angelic rosewood face whose black scar
the size of a seed pearl just inches below the neck
suddenly burns in the blue light of the screen.