Long Black Veil

By Peter Mladinic

“Long Black Veil” is a 1959 country ballad, written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin and originally recorded by Lefty Frizzell.

Roy Bentley, you write poetry breaks 

your heart every day, or maybe, this county

with its deaf ear that hears no poetry

except what’s drummed into young kids

in school.  That goes double for oil country,

where I live, and before my time Lefty

Frizzell, who lived in Loco Hills. 

“She walks these hills in a long black veil.”

This is hard country.  Even today Loco Hills

is hard to look at. Were it a face, cracked

and wizened, you might quickly turn away.

The people here busy their hands

getting black gold out of the ground,

all the machinery it takes to do that.

Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman

and Frost are the last things on their minds.

Loco Hills is shacks and scrub. It is hills,

an oddity, since lost of here is flat.

Tumbleweeds in wind blow across blacktop

and in fields where to walk you’d get stickers

on your socks, they sting to pull put.

The land is pale, libraries few, bookshops

nonexistent. A few readers, 

except the Bible and the News-Sun.

I have a friend, Jerry, very bright, whose

reading doesn’t go beyond Zane Grey

and Robert Ludlum.  He knows all about oil.

Semi retired, he does PR for Halliburton. 

His kids, daughter in Oklahoma, son

in Indonesia are also in oil.  Jerry knows oil

but if a nearly flawless poem, say Kieth 

Douglas’s “Behavior of Fish in an Egyptian

Tea Garden” fell from the sky and landed

at his feet, he wouldn’t know what it is. 

Same with my friend Mondo, who,

when we shake hands always annoys me

with his hard grip.  That comes

from drilling. Lots of men here are missing 

a finger. Fingers get caught in wenches

if, in the field, the crew slips up. Mondo’s

a crew leader.  He writes about the oil field

but, as with Jerry, doesn’t touch poetry.

Few in our country touch poetry, fewer here.

Jerry knows Lefty’s songs, Lefty Frizzell

played music here.  Oil was booming. Ruled

by what it takes to get that stuff to gush 

into dollars, Loco Hills and thereabouts

hears pump-jack clangs, not poems.

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Voices from the Past, is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications.  An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.