Joseph’s Song
I sang it once. Three hours
stacking crates in the belly of a U-Haul truck,
its snout facing dead west into a sunset
a carpenter would cut a window for.
Peaked shadows of boys jousted in the park,
smoke of barbecue pits rising through locust trees,
beetles etching bark with the sadness
of each small town in the Southwest.
I heard it once at a county fair,
roped donkeys circling a post, children strapped
to their backs, some crying, others blank-faced
as the coins they spent to ride
this portable barnyard to cities without names
and cornerless streets.
I heard my stepfather humming it
at the wheel of his ’63 Impala, driving us all night
across the desert, a full moon leaning on my mother’s face,
in which I saw a map of the journey.
I climbed from the sleepy back seat and saw
headlights streak by like shooting stars.
Composer, performer, scholar, and poet Michael Hicks received a DMA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and has been teaching at BYU since 1985. He is the author of four books-Mormonism and Music: A History (1989), Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (1999), Henry Cowell, Bohemian (2002), and The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book (2012); the first three of these were published by University of Illinois Press, which in 2012 published his book co-authored with Christian Asplund, entitled Christian Wolff. His dozens of historical and analytical articles have appeared in books such as the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Mormonism as well as journals that include American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, and Perspectives of New Music. He has been a guest lecturer at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley and has read papers at various national conferences (including UCLA’s multidisciplinary Conference on American Studies Connecting with Religion, 1991) and national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.
He has twice won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1994 and 2003) for his writing about music and a third time as editor of the journal American Music, a post he held from 2007-2010. His poetry, meanwhile, has been published in Dialogue, BYU Studies, Literature and Belief, Sunstone, and in the anthologies Cadence of Hooves (2008), New Poets of the American West (2010), and Fire in the Pasture (2011).
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