THE SINGING

There are eight of us in the waiting room
of the service department in the car dealership.
Some are reading newspapers, or scrolling on their phones,
or watching the TV with the news on, the sound
off.  There’s a woman sitting in the corner
looking down at her phone.  She is humming, very softly.
The room is more like a lounge just off the lobby
of a nice hotel, with tall plants and couches.
I am reading paperwork for my job, one part of my mind
thinking about that, another part thinking
about the things the mechanic might find wrong
with my car, acting like it has a bad cough.
The humming woman is sitting near enough
that I can hear her humming begin to take on words
in a language I don’t know.  It sounds
like an African language, its soft registers making me think
the woman is singing a lullaby or a nostalgic song
about a landscape, though for all I know
she might be singing about a war or the clanging streets
of a city.  In the half hour all of us are there
together, no one entering the room, no one called away,
the woman’s humming begins to turn
insistently into singing.  As her voice gets louder and lifts
into what must be the song’s sad ecstasy,
an equal disquiet seems to thicken the air of the room.
Everyone is listening.  No one is looking
at her, but everyone is now aware that she is there,
brought into this consensus.  At first the singing
is a novel kind of delight.  The unabashed woman is a story
we will get to tell about later.  But as it goes on,
demanding our attention, it becomes another thing.
In one part of the room is a coffee station.  In another part
is a popcorn machine where you can help
yourself to little bags of popcorn.  On the TV, the face
of the man speaking looks like a square of ham.
The woman is looking down at her phone
and singing.  It is the same song, looping, the same eerie
rise and fall.  Someone, I think, will walk to her and tell her
to stop.  Someone, I think, will tell someone
in the car dealership to make her stop.  Someone will call
the police, or think of doing so, as one part
of my mind is doing now, crouched in a declivity
of shame.  With kind curiosity, I also want
to go to the woman and ask her what the song is about.
One span of the song sounds like a scorched house,
while another quavers upward, as when
the plane sharply banks, filling the window with the sky.
No one in the room has moved for a long time.
There is no resolving the moment until it ends.
Whether the woman is aware of the rest of us, she does not
give any indication by lowering her voice.
She sings.  She sings.  She sings.  She sings.