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I’m on the Mississippi Blues Trail
with my wife Katherine and we
go to Red’s Juke Joint in Clarksdale
to listen to Jimmy “Duck” Holmes.
Katherine perceives that Anthony
Bourdain is there also enjoying himself
so she moves her chair closer to him
and he smiles. She loves cooking Cajun
and maybe she tells him so and he
smiles more. The great lover of
foods in so many places seems
also to love the blues in Red’s
Juke Joint. Some years after our
Winter Blues Trail trip is over
our daughter, who married a Franconian
in Germany and loves to cook calls
us, all upset with the news that Bourdain
took his life. So sad, but I’m glad we saw
him savoring the red-hot blues in such
a friendly place as Red’s where so many
people are very happy to be and thoroughly
enjoy Red’s grilled meat and the red hot blues
of Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and the whole night
was so memorable and my iPhone caught
Anthony smiling while my wife sat near him.
But, sadly, the blues could not keep him alive.
Norbert Krapf, a former Indiana Poet Laureate, has published a number of poetry collections, including the recent “Ida Hagan of the Pinkston Freedom Settlement” set mainly in his native Dubois County in southern Indiana, and his forthcoming “On the Mississippi Blues Trail and Beyond.” He has performed poetry and the blues with bluesman Gordon Bonham and released a poetry and jazz CD, Imagine: Indiana in Music and Words.