Grateful Dead Tapes by Ed Skoog

Even though we’ve already been dead,

when I find two trays of Grateful Dead tapes

in a Missoula secondhand store,

I too feel bound in the stasis of cassette,

plastic cases scarred and cracked

like old scuba goggles. Some retain

the delicate peg that lets the door swing open;

some have broken, maybe from a fall

when someone slid too fast the van door open

in a hot parking lot. Could be no tragedy

made the tapes secondhand greater

than a lost interest. Used to listen to them,

the owner might say, the way you adjust

to walking past a grave. I love him, or her,

who has curated these happenings, although

the Dead’s not really my bag. I follow

other melodies and injured visions, draw

my cider from another press, a cooler lava.

I saw them once, summer of ’95 at RFK,

with my friend Jax. It was terrible,

a lot of twentieth-century business came due

at once. Bob Dylan opened unintelligible

and sleepy as if reaching from the frost

to make known “in life I was Bob Dylan.”

The Dead would play five more stands:

Auburn Hills, Pittsburgh, Noblesville,

Maryland Heights, Chicago, then done,

those last shows, autobiographies of indulgence.

Lightning struck by a branch. We left early.

Tapers caught every note of the show.

You can hear it forever at archive.org.

In my greatest period of disorientation,

the Dead, like death, seemed best avoided.

Yet I was the sort who might admit

a simplifying affection like the Dead.

I remember, coming down in a cornfield

near a creek at dawn, talking it out with Jason

whether those trees were weird, or that

weirdness took the form of trees,

and every woman I pursued

had a pet cat that made me sneeze.

They either liked the Dead or Neil

Diamond. Yet I would persevere,

like one with a disorder, hanging

in the doorway to their petite kitchens

while they ground coffee, or searched

the crisper for a roommate’s hidden beer.

I longed to become more elaborate,

my approaches too simple and still are,

ask anyone about pleasure’s light opera

and the children’s music of the first kiss,

the hair metal of the second. And now

I play the Dead around the house.

It’s children’s music. We play operettas,

Pinafore, Penzance, for the same reasons,

because they are kind and almost meaningless.

I make few claims. What lasts is awkward

chance, like this thrift-store wrench

anthologized on pegboard, or smudges

on a yellow phone. I’m not buying

the tapes today. The price isn’t marked

and the clerk’s busy. I keep what marriage

and child need, a few books and held-back objects,

metal or paper, letters from old loves,

because letters are antique, and for

the limestone antiquity of those affections.

Via Biblioklept