How Jeff Has Touched His Fans

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I was reading about the 'Golden Promise' and I did make one when he died...I swore to myself that I would not forget how he made me feel in my innocence when I first saw him live at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. There is not a day that goes bye that I don't think back to then, back to the looks on the tear filled faces of countless young people from around the world who gathered in one place...even tho we were all so different we were really all alike...we experienced the same loves, hates, fears, and realizations...I think Jeff understood this...he read the human heart, or at least it was open to him like a book is to us. --Brandon

The following poem was written by Craig Arnold, whose book Shells was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. It was called to my attention by Mary Guibert, Jeff's mom, in the Jeff Buckley International Newsletter. It brings me to tears. Enjoy --

Grace
Written by Craig Arnold

Jeff Buckley, 1966-1997

You were barely thirty, and now you've gone
and drowned, walked off a Mississippi

River marina in Memphis, clothes and all
laughing, washed up at the base

of Beale Street by the bars, and you weren't even
drunk, or like your father found

spider-clenched up with the needle still
sticking -- you, who were sweet and smart

and beautiful, who bought a hat to teach
yourself responsibility,

dead by your own wild-child-eyed exuberance.
The voice has gone forever out

of yourself, choked with heart stuck in the throat,
Vienna choirboy gone banshee

dive-bombing us through thunderheads of swirled-
together songs, the blues tuned

up too tightly, past what the wound string
could take, snapped, a snake feeding

back on its own tail. You sang lully lullay
lully lullay and got away.

with it, you hallelujah'd, made me follow
the curve of every note, led

me momently to believe. But this you leave
to me only, to each of us

alone, no us at all--you were a vice
as shameful to admit as chas-

tity, as embarrassing to share--like dogs
licking a hurt we listen, womb-

walled away in our headphones, wiretappers,
eavesdropping on the moan, mindful

not to breathe too loud, to read our own
lips in silence. Now that you're gone,

give us the grace to slowly find each other
out, the shed skin, the loss of in-

nocence you've been the parton of -- the boy
who lost his, tossed to one

end of a strange bed, the thread drawn
out of his body into another's

privacy, until you'd lullaby'd
him back to the sad eroded sleep

of the come-unraveled -- in that husband's side
you are a thorn, tucked into

his wife's purse next to the contraceptives,
the one abandon he can't share

with her, played out with others, in the dark
in a parked car, unfaithful, yes,

but less than he--the girl who hounded you
from club to club, in the front row

against the stage each night, grappling the air
stretching to claw her fingers through

your head of tumbled-out-of-bed brown hair
and snare one for a keepsake,

a relic -- when at last you yielded, between
Je Ne Connais Pas Le Fin

and Last Goodbye, groped down in your jeans,
pulled out a loose hair, tendered it

shyly for her to take. And as for me
when you washed up, I was in the south

of France, the troubadours' old stomping ground
--there, in a pink and white church,

a stopover along the Holy Bodies'
circuit to Santiago, named

for a bishop torn apart by wild horses
--there, in a crypt that smells of water

dripped through bones, is a triple box of glass,
the outermost pavilion gold,

octagonal, to match the church's spire,
the second silver, square, the last

the exact size and shape of a crack vial
in which you barely make out

the wisp of bramble, thorn from the Thorny Crown.
I wanted to steal the whole thing,

spirit it out of the country, take it home
and under the tiers of glass, one

in four in eight, enshrine that single hair,
and stick the thorn back in my side

where it belongs.

<~~~(back to tribute)