The Gospel of the Blues

^{—for Roy DeCarava}

We come out of the hotel in the window,
women holding babies in cotton playsuits,
girls across the street in brown eyes, stares,
cheeks on the sides of masks in divination,
ancestral legs angling over edges of flat shoes,
giggles of girls in barrettes, of suns in shadows
where our breath is the sentience of trumpets,
jerking out across fallow fields in Virginia,
our impudence sounded out when we say,

“We have the power to redeem America
but not until America agrees ... to see us.”

Love comes down hard, born to bare breasts,
teasing overwhelmed hearts of spinsters alone
like a city alone in its rock, its strength, ebony
love of Africa bustling in canals to its heart,
like hands on narrative oars of galley ships,
while the eye of the city is perched on hips,
millions of spirits in the tired eye of faces
beneath knotted, beady hair, oracles plaited
while dropped brooms by doors signal escape.

“They called our children buttermilk when
they were born to the lust of white fathers.”

Sing the song of Satin Legs Smith, black men
of the projected chin, clean felt hats, hair
brushed on the side, shoulders like wheels,
blossom of a chest in suits and ties standing
on the street like constellations, embroidery
of stars running to rivers in our eyes, our pearls
in skin with rage held low, beautified the way
a woman becomes a leopard, a hiss, a cutting tear
we feel when alone or crowded into one being.

“Look down the road so long the road became
our song, a gospel, a prayerbook for the blues.”

Who’s gonna mind the children if mama dies,
keep them out of bars, crap games, and crack,
remind them to honor God and keep home holy,
tell them they had a poor old mother who cried
each time The Devil wanted his way and kept
their breath away from danger, kept it inside her,
gave them an anchor in what’s right, not wrong,
let them know how she had to be a howling wind
to feed them, a natural storm so they could sleep.

“Black women drew a line in the sky, around
the moon where north and south was One Land.”

Daddy claimed he heard Billie Holiday sing live,
got close enough to see the fire in her fine china,
the smooth pull in her voice what was sadness,
close enough to steal an eye full of her love,
smell her perfume sifting over Baltimore harbor,
and he reached up, grabbed his head, hollered
the day she died as if he really knew her the way
Frank O’Hara knew her and stopped, stillness
like the boiling stage lights that stole her away.

“Black folk reach for white folk, white folk
reach for black, in between is Henrietta Lack.”

John Coltrane studied the note, Charlie Parker
studied the way they hooked onto empty space,
making themselves gods out to their silences,
shoulders leaning while they tapped the pads,
music rising to the point on top of their heads,
to where the Chinese say a hundred flowers
bloom, where angels and tiny buddhas sit,
shaking their waists with hands on their hips
like root workers dancing some electric slide.

“Electric slide wasn’t made by no white man.
Yes, it was! He can dance it just like you can.”

A white woman told me Mahalia Jackson
sounded like a barbarian to her, she said it
to me raw, not like the way Mahalia Jackson
sang our Sweet Jesus to us at Christmas time
when we waited for the Sears Roebuck catalog
to turn into something we could touch and count,
our hands going over them the way Mahalia
ran her brown fingers over hurt and found Jesus
on the corner with the gospel of the blues.

“My Jesus is your Jesus, don’t you know.
Just lay your Bible down in my window.”

Coltrane used to gain and lose weight, season
of a man like Romare Bearden, in other life
a woman like Augusta Savage, life made long
by art, breathing along the geography of making,
a cartography of the new, wisdom in the rise
of wind in a tree as tall as Howard Thurman,
this religion called culture, this culture called
a rising up from the common ocean of human,
a Pacific letting Shanghai kiss San Franciso.

“Tai Chi masters walk on water like Jesus do,
all in the book we call The Gospel of the Blues.”

Black folk contort like jigsaw puzzles popping
on dance floors, trees sending branches to where
this world connects with the world of Immortals,
Li Bai taking tea with Langston Hughes, Du Fu
listening to Aretha Franklin, her father preaching
a deep tenor Tang Dynasty sermon, Johnny Cash
with Shine on Me with Beale Street rhythm,
Los Angeles, New Orleans, Boston, Dallas
where Texas southwestern shouters whisper.

“It’s hard gimme gimme, shake down shimmy
of an American oracle, The Gospel of the Blues.”