Invisible Strings - 10. "Dreaming the Lowdown" by Yusef Komunyakaa*

"Dreaming the Lowdown" by Yusef Komunyakaa

I've had a most difficult time trying to make inroads on this one. I have searched high and low for similar imagery, themes, characters...anything...and I am coming up empty-handed. So, I took to Google to see if I could learn anything about the poet that might help. His bio on Google:

Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

And with that, I feel VERY out of my league. I thought about admitting defeat on this one, but I don't have a lot of quit in me. So, I will try to do what I can with it and hope that maybe insight or inspiration will strike later on down the road.

The first line, "Now, around here they call me / St. Peter" had me thinking of the song "Peter." The narrator in the poem says, "I know you wish to know exactly where I've been," and the narrator in the song, "You said you were gonna grow up / Then you were gonna come find me," so there's an element of someone being gone and returning in both the poem and the song. But I feel that the time period of the poem plays an important role, so I have to rule out "Peter."

The poem mentions "my baby-blue Studebaker" and the poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream." A cursory internet search tells me that Studebakers were produced from 1902 to 1966, and "The Emperor of Ice Cream" was copyrighted in 1954. So, I'm thinking the poem is set in the 1950's - 60's. The only song that comes to mind from that time period is "Timeless." It's the strongest connection I can make, so I'm choosing it for now.

There are so many things in the poem that I can't connect - Redding (California? Connecticut?), Philly, the el, prayer rugs, the reference to the twelve apostles ("then twelve little circles within flesh and stone"), and "the hairshirt stashed beneath a breezy rosebush." I know enough to know that I don't know much, so I hope to return to this one again.

*This may not be my final answer, so I'm noting the title with an asterisk so I remember to return to it.