Jeff Buckley's Death

Frozen blue voice with mud around it,
arise from the brown depths of the Mississippi,
this voice was
left behind, and
it drowned.

The drowning was foreshadowed,
in the words of a teenager,
angry and writing in her journal.
She misinterpreted his lyrics correctly.
Yes, there was a water theme in those lines
those moody lines of a cute, dirty white boy with a guitar.

The teenager, she lives in a cold place too
and she thinks she feels dead inside.
So

She is in harmony with his voice, naturally haunting,
coming from the thickness of Southern climate, the tepid mud of his final rest.
With eyes closed, the connection is closer, innate. She can see it all now

The way his life ends and how his words entombed.
All the nuances in the instruments, the inflections in his voice, the pattern of breathing:
they all came together somehow

And that gothy girl no one paid attention to,
the one even the poet feels embarrassed to have let enter,
Yes, that girl:
She foretold Jeff Buckley’s death
in a dirty beat up journal, tear-stained and all.