“Sweet Baby James”

“Sweet Baby James”: “The rhythm of the chorus evoked a Wild West waltz: a whirl of ladies in satin dresses of dense kingfisher-blue and deep-woods fir, whose abundant hair had been pinned back, whose honest faces and smiles of unparted lips bent upward to their partners. These images arose from the waltzing footsteps of the chorus, but the lyrics overlaid them with others: the moonlight ladies became charmers witnessed in the man’s stargazing, phantasms with oak-foliage manes who borrowed their limbs from junipers and their trunks from pines, heavenly ladies with auras like Luna’s. And, as the cowboy sang himself to sleep, as he felt the fixed, rigid bars of his mental cage begin to reshape themselves like some geometrically flexible toy, as they softened and warped, losing their former sharpness of edge, the moonlight ladies got transformed from lovers to mothers and began to rock their beloved infant to sleep. Into the soft and densely-colored spaces of the dream-world boat they tenderly placed their charge, all the time singing and rocking the cradle as they pushed the canoe of his consciousness off the shore and into the wide, dark waters.”