An Open Apology to Robert Haas on the 25th Anniversary of Janis Joplin’s Death
A Poem by Burt Bradley
I’m sorry Bob that I threw you over for long dead Janis doing “Ball and Chain” at Woodstock. I was eighteen that summer, just out of high school, just out in the world working forty-two days straight, twelve to seventeen hours a day (overtime only after fifty hours a week) in a cold storage plant during pear season. I worked on my poetry, driving a forklift in and out of refrigerated warehouses, kept at forty degrees Fahrenheit. I wore two coats, gloves, ski hat, boots, wool socks, and still froze, sitting in the 100-degree sun at noon (Sacramento in July) only taking off one of the coats. On the forty-second day, I snapped. Someone had broken a crate of pears and left it in one of the warehouses. I was blamed by a foreman who relished belittling the workers. I chased him down two flights of stairs and across the parking lot to the manager’s office where he locked himself inside, yelling out I was fired to my yelling in, I quit. The forty-nine Pontiac I drove the twenty miles of river road home didn’t have a radio. I never heard Janis or about Woodstock until I saw it on the evening news, watching old, wonderful Walter Cronkite reporting with a bemused smile, as I ate a TV dinner (Swanson) on a pear crate. So, when the blues hour came on tonight, the same time you, Bob, were reading poetry on National Public Radio, I turned the dial and wept, like a blues harmonica, listening to that throaty moan of Janis Joplin’s crazed, whiskyed love of life pouring out until it overflowed, like the tears of your “immense, illiterate, consoling angels.”
Burt Bradley (he/him) lived on a bluff in Northwest Wyoming seventy miles from Yellowstone National Park. For over thirty years, with his wife Janet, a photographer, he has delved into the wild serenity of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. His writing has appeared in Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best of Writers at Work, among others. His book, After Following, was published by Wayfarer Books.
