CHARLIE CLARK
Gram Parsons
Let’s say the problem isn’t that, as a subject, it’s overused,
but that it introduces too many narrative possibilities
to mention the music of Gram Parsons here.
Yet that each arc involves, inevitably, flames,
and restlessness, and how the arms of a nearby cactus
can be something to envy;
shows how when, finally, a car appears, when flames follow soon
thereafter,
the music—the whine of the car, the blazing
wind’s passage—makes a kind of counterpoint to the actual tune,
makes Parsons’s singing—what’s pouring from the car—
both worth it and so overtly intentional.
Like this less music than comment on the scenes that deserts and cars
engender.
The lonesome and the high.
Those we can’t stop seeing end in flames.
The we in this case being myself,
the me in this case feeling itself lonesome, and restless, and yet a
multitude for how this music fractures it,
makes it think landscape or song could be a solution;
and the problem, whatever it is, survives—
it’s crucial that the problem survives—
by becoming indistinguishable from the solution,
which is to say it survives as lyric,
for how it believes in burning more than it does reason. 
Gram Parsons
Listening to Sun Ra, Birds Convene Outside My Window