BACKGROUND AND CAVEAT:

In 1987 a singer by the name of “Licorice” McKechnie disappeared and remains missing today, presumed dead. My title is borrowed, with gratitude, from a song by the group The Incredible String Band, which she had left in 1973. Obscure as the lady herself, certain references in this poem are likely to be opaque to all but Stringheads.


The retrospectives sometimes miss her name,
Whether she was Chris-tee-na or Chris-tye-na—
That German sites have christened Caroline.—
But fey, she frolicked on the album jackets,

And cradled a fat toad or baby bird
In pale and slender hands. We saw her soar
Breezy and carnationed in a swing;
In wood and meadow, saw her in velour,

In liner notes, the candy soubriquet.
Pitched up in schoolgirl euphonies we heard
Her sing what merry Robin penned, “Papa
Would take me to the park to see the swans. . .”

Rose-browed, but whispered bare neath her chiffons,
Whirled through by dusts and potions, so they say,
A butterfly beneath the waking sunlight,
Moth at the dreaming sweet, black sticky flame.

And if some sandalwood and silken summer
Of plucked sitar, the spun to silver web
Of beads and bells sang different beckoning,
The coil of jasmine round about that wound her

Drew her to some other song, say the wren
Before the robin or before the heron?
Would still the girl mulleined and leafed in muslin
And Sunday school soprano, furred and cloched,

Have gowned like Guinevere and flower-crowned
Her glazy visage, sung off-key at Woodstock,
And mourned with “Darling Belle” in widow’s weeds,
Once reeked to soot in grey Midlothian reckoning,
Her woolens sluiced in housepaint and woodstain?



The narrative is hindsight at its best,
An August thing of maybes and what ifs,
How chance the Thetan grasp that more than tithed.
Or after copter flight past blocked off roads,

How mudding tent and torrent that first night
Of hidden stars and candles in the rain
Displaced gold Robin’s band and staged them up
Next day between Canned Heat and CCR

To underwhelm the half a million strong,
With coy sweet songs about “This Moment” whose
Legatos might have joined the shooting stars
But for the blotting clouds and weeping muse--

Not quite the meteoric rise to fame,
But just enough for three more years of tunes,
And then the spotlights yield to western sun,
The service trays and crockery, public bus,

Robin’s painted guitar. Inclined to sing,
Declined to teach “Old Songs and Cottages.”
E-meter’s golden tethered tantalus?—
Too high the plumping fruit, too low the water.

How did the rest evade their dotages?
One to nostalgia circuit bowed, and one
A mayoress, and one a Cardiff bard--
And three dismiss to death even her name,

Though unclaimed royalties may wait to yield
Solace for Perseid nights that passed unstarred:
To hell with Hubbard and with Yasgur’s field--
The children of star seed and beggars’ weeds
Had never loved her like the bud and blotter.



The folklore even disagrees on this:
Whether the last who ever knew her found her
Footprints nudging the Arizona dunes,
Giving the slip to Hubbard’s church. What if

They never find a ragged shawl or diary?
A scorpion in a skull, a tarnished chain?
A final letter, mailed in nineteen ninety,
From Sacramento, to a Scottish sister,

Was three years’ leave to fray the stitch of rumor--
"Shared open mikes in London in the nineties"/
"Impromptu a cappella Wiccan chants"/
"Asleep in batterer’s yard"/ "From hard park bench,

Pulled nameless to the steam of LA streets"/
"Took serious drugs and wore no underpants"/
"Abducted by space aliens in the desert
With Captain Beefheart"/ "Let a cult subsume her--"

I think we cut our cloaks to August promptings.
This month can hunt you down, pull you up short:
I think on August nights of men like Manson,
Who think on August mornings of blood sport.

I think, when summer’s hit the downhill sands,
I know a doomed thing when I see or hear it,
And downward wave’s as deep, so I suppose
That if, some brocade noontide, coppery bands

Of sunlight drew her west to other strands,
An island beach embroidering her clothes
With knots of sea wrack, blue-green stinging seaweed’s
Matty floss as richly might have gowned her,
As gauzy veil of Morpheus around her.

Copyright Briar Rose 2008


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Collage: August Night Sky