terrible flowering of their madness

  There's a sheriff's car parked near Emerald Mound, 

 and the deputy is looking down at his lap and smiling, 

       which means he's probably doing what everyone else is doing 

 these days, that is, texting, though I think he's knitting a quilt 

              out of the scalps he's taken off travelers like me: 

              a killer has been working these country roads of late 

 with a blue flashing light, pulling people over and shooting 

       them for fun, like the men who lived in caves on the Natchez 

 Trace in the day and who killed travelers for money and then 

              because they found out how much they liked killing. 

              Historian Robert Coates says these men would have been 

 like others if they'd stayed back east, though once they entered 

       the wilderness, they opened their own hearts 

 to the dark heart of the continent, breathed in its perfumed 

              appeal, beheld the terrible flowering of their madness, 

              and revealed by their violence how different they were 

 from other men, and I like this, it makes sense, 

       but I wonder if those men might not have been okay if they'd just 

 had girlfriends. It's one big black and white movie 

              when your baby's not in the picture, that's for sure: 

              promoter Dick Waterman wakes one morning to the sound 

 of blues man Robert Pete Williams playing his guitar 

       and singing softly, and when Waterman says That's 

 beautiful, you should play that at your shows, Williams 

              says Oh, no, that's not music, I'm just talking to my Hattie