Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
He was a skinny, 6-foot-6 blonde guy with broad shoulders living in Tucson, driving night shift for Yellow Cab. He’d been a painter, but stopped in a “I’m never painting again!” kind of way. He’d been in a relationship, long after which the woman mailed him a photo of a little boy about four who looked just like him. He didn’t know he had a kid. I don’t think he’d recovered from that when I met him.
“Swing the wax cradle” refers to a sort of malleable cradle, not the sturdy one you’d want. “In the burning tree” might be a family tree, and the wax is going to melt and jeopardize the child in the cradle. I had no idea where I fit into his reality, which seemed to be in darkness. We conducted ourselves as if it was a relationship, which included the regular chopping up of furniture to burn for heat in the very small adobe house he rented in the barrio. The limited amount of furniture available wasn’t a disaster when you consider that Tucson doesn’t get that cold in the winter. Actually, that was about the only thing that was working out, considering there was no electricity or hot water.
He was in some sort of knock-down drag-out fight with himself, and I think we were also the wax cradle in the burning tree, a shadow catastrophe on the outskirts of his dismal escape to the desert, which is sometimes where people go to hide before running back to re-occupy their former lives.
Swing the wax cradle
in the burning tree
lay flat in rusted cage
pale moon of a half face waking
yellowed up by fear
He is the thing he hates
Every swing releases
the scent of blackened spice
fast sweep of hiding
feeding up the sky
crystal splinter
and hiss against the sun
“Trapped Against” from Dovetail (K, 1992) (download):
