Well, the previous post lost the line breaks; this one I think will retain the correct breaks, but the hyphens are weird.


The Singer Major Wiley

Along the sidewalks of West Third Street,
over the irregular plates and ridges of dark gray ice
clamped to the frozen concrete, a wind cold to the point of pain
blew hissing veils of granular snow
to tick against the glass in the door,
to pile in the corners of the storefront window
of the Café Elysée, candle﷓-haunted, cinnamon﷓-scented, chiming
with the click and clink of china in the shadows;
it is dead now these twenty years

There I would hear the singer Major Wiley,
trim and broad﷓-shouldered, with the moderate stature,
the moon face of West African ancestors; he sang
the old traditional songs in a rough pale tenor.
He carried a big steel﷓-strung Chicago-﷓made guitar,
and he played it in a style
at once robust and untutored. To everything he sang
he brought an urgent intensity:
songs of love, songs about badmen, the sour laments
of slavery days. A basket was passed for coins; that café
was too poor to pay its singers

Late in the evening, as the snow built up on the windows,
as the wicks sailed away on luminous clear lakes of wax,
he grew tired; the songs grew more quiet and more somber.
If I had wings, he said, like Noah's dove,
and he said, I would fly up this river
to the one I love, and he played a little
decorative curl of notes round the end of the line,
a little filigree of sound, and all the time
the snow tapping: Let me in. Ah, you all know
that old song, where the melody
descends in the third line like a three-﷓tiered waterfall,
to plunge beneath a minor chord and there
his voice like a pike in a black mountain pool
moved through bitter regret, hopeless longing

I see him, I see him still before my eye,
young and confident, sturdy as a post,
centered in the splash of light, quick﷓-fingered,
thick﷓-throated, singing with a voice
like silvered gravel

Tell me, who among you, given those wings,
would not fly back to the ones you love, though you left them
oh so far upstream?