I Hear America Singing the Blues

Three birds, their fat bodies mangoes among the winter branches, belted
blues outside my house the morning my father died. Nobody foretold it.

Not even the doctor, though the old folks would later claim the birds
as sign. Three a.m., pitch-black January, a song loud and full throated

troubling the Alabama morning, and my father, not knowing his heart
would quit that day, filled his thermos with coffee, put on pressed pants,

starched shirt, shoes polished to sparkle, while my mother sang
“When Sunny Gets Blue” with Johnny Mathis on the clock radio.  

I was dreaming of red bell bottoms and new white Keds, throwing
my legs out as I leaned back on a blue swing—my ponytails 

a tandem of happiness, red bows tied just so. Again and again
I flung my body against the air, kicked, hovered like a held note, 

like the momentary stillness before the hawk dives and murders
its startled prey. Then and only then, would I launch, as only a child 

can launch, my whole body and heart unafraid of landing or the blues
of hard ground that always comes one day. My father kissed me, 

minutes before his body wedged itself between tub  and toilet, before
my mother, a singing bird, heard the song his body made when it hit

the floor. His name became a question, repeating, so loud it stopped me
mid-swing, so loud the birds stopped to listen as she called and called 

in the silence of his departing soul. The morning my father died,
Martin Luther King, Jr. was thirty-nine and Lyndon Johnson slept uneasy.

Bessie Smith, long dead, was singing in their heads. Nobody knows you
when you’re down and out, she sang to the drowning men, to a whole 

nation under water, on fire, on the precipice of new tunes. Where
were the blues going? Outside, war—on poverty, in the streets, in Vietnam 

where the jungle bristled with singing birds. My cousin was fighting there.
The one my father raised as son, the one who later gave me a pearl ring, 

told me the story of Okinawan divers,  had a wife, daughter and good times.
One day that cousin would steal from me for a fix, the shambles of his life 

shuffled like a losing hand, like a story only the blues can tell. I saw him
for the last time, stranger and relative, hands shoved in his pockets prison style, 

walking down my street. I watched him, his name uncalled, until he disappeared
beyond the tree line into memory. Maybe he died the next day. Maybe 

he went to rehab. Maybe he is alive and well diving for pearls, pearls
more delicate than bullets that whizzed by my daughter’s car as she waited 

for the light to turn. But where was she to turn, assaulted by flying pearls,
caught in a war between two cars of young men set on the blues?  

She feared the song her body might make, the sound of her mother’s song, 
a whole nation of mothers, a hallelujah chorus of Ma Rainey, their throats 

raw, the color of red bell bottoms: Lord, going to sleep now, just now I got
bad news. To try to dream away my troubles, countin’ these blues.  

(Ma Rainey, tell us your dream now. What will our future be? We’re stuck
In these blues, Ma Rainey. Can’t do nothing, but wait and see. )

Four months after my father died, Mahalia told the Lord to take King’s hand. 
He was tired, weary, and plumb worn out. The thud of his body hitting 

the balcony, the repetition of these themes, Second Line keeps playing,
blues replicating like rifle shots, the grocery, the school, the mosque, 

the church—I am black and blue with singing—the synagogue, in the street,
everywhere, everywhere, everywhere bodies falling like soldiers in the jungle,

like children hurling themselves off swings indifferent to the  ground or birds
that bellow the blues, loud and raw-throated, full of lament and portend, 

and we go on as if the world is not primed for destruction, as if each day is
as ordinary as the morning my father got up,  put on his clothes, reached

 for his cigarettes and died, there on the bathroom floor while my mother sang
with Johnny Mathis Love is gone so what can it matter, and I dreamed of summer.