Now That The Bluesman Is Gone (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

It’s in the streets of Manhattan that poets sing
And dance and drink and hide and die alone unrepentant
It’s in the streets of Manhattan that the very poor live long
And suffer and pray and read magazines and collect coupons
For shoes and bags and umbrellas and trips to Tahiti
And watch television and die alone in brownstone tenements
And in cement lots behind heaps of rotting trash and dilapidated walls
It’s in the streets of Manhattan that bankers sing
And swindlers swindle the unwary and the lonely and the dead
And it’s in the streets of Manhattan that fast-talking men
And fast-talking women in stiletto heels and short skirts
Sing and dance and hide and drink and die alone unrepentant
It’s in the streets of Manhattan that old women visit the grocer
And visit the butcher and keep tulips in tin pots and wooden boxes
On windowsills and it’s old women who cook stews every Friday
And walk and ride buses and trains to Pulitzer Square every Sunday morning
To sit on benches near the fountain with Venus at the top of it
To watch expensively attired foreigners promenade up and down the avenue
It’s living in this city and its streets that is an impossible task
But it’s accomplished every second and every hour
And the exhausted and the lonely and the forlorn turn up
In doorways and movie theatres and small West Village apartments
And spacious well-lit West End Avenue rooms overlooking the Hudson
It’s living in this city and its streets that kills and buries and forgets
Its dead its bankers its poets its fast-talking men and women
Its a downtown Chinese dishwasher and its Bowery bums
And drunks and feral vagrants and whores
It’s living in this city and its streets that kill
And bury the bankers and the poets and old women
And pensioned off subway trackmen and retired public school teachers
It’s living in this city and its streets that kills and buries and forgets
The uniformed policeman crossing a street to lean against a window
The man behind the wheel of a taxi in a black turban
The woman in thick spectacles stooping on church steps
To drop change into a drunk’s paper cup
And it’s this drunk’s tears and mumblings and wild gazing
In these city streets with its crowds moving through them
That needn’t be recorded here or repeated by anyone else anywhere
It’s living in this city and its streets that kills and buries and forgets
The architect and the engineer who coax shapes in steel and cement
And it’s as ships against black skies
That mammoth steel bridges stand and sway and dip and sail off
It’s living in this city and its streets that kills and buries and forgets
The architect and the engineer and the mason and the plumber
Who raised first one skyscraper and then hundreds
Erecting canyons and peculiar recesses and isolated squares
With iron-fenced flowerbeds and small fountains and benches
And here to these forlorn spots of penumbra and solitude
Come strangers one and all come to sit and stare and remember
They’ve come to puzzle over what they’ve seen in the streets
They’ve come to puzzle over what they’ve heard in the streets
They’ve come to puzzle over why this city
With its wide avenues and endless streets humming
With the voices of millions of lonely men and lonely women
And millions of purses rattling and cash-registers ringing
Why this city blinds the seers and renders deaf the listeners
And chokes and otherwise hinders the intentions of the talkers
And snaps the life out of those who get out of bed one morning
With an idea to write and to sing and to dance and to celebrate
This city and its streets and avenues and its inhabitants
Strangers the lot of them to each other strangers to themselves
Trees aren’t trees in Manhattan and oxygen isn’t oxygen
And the East and the Hudson rivers channel time and not water

2

There’s a bluesman on Convent Avenue
Up on the fourth floor of a brownstone walkup
(his front door lock is broken and it’s been that way for years)
He drinks wine and whisky when he’s got cash in his tin box
And he sits all day because his legs can keep him upright any more
He’s a broken man in most ways visible and otherwise
And from morning till dusk he drinks and smokes and hums
And he strums his guitar and with his feet taps out slow rhythms
He drinks and plucks the guitar strings by a tall window
A window with unhindered vistas of the eastern sky
And all that’s below it and stretches out to the distance
Stretches out to a sea the bluesman has never seen
The bluesman has got melodies in his guitar strings and frets
He’s got songs in his throat and his heart and in his old bones
For everything that he’s witnessed up and down Harlem
And even for what he’s seen over the years up on Morningside Heights
And beyond and he strums his guitar sitting by the window
He’s been watching Manhattan skies for seventy-eight years
He reads the clouds and waits for the twilight
And observes the dancing days with dancing eyes
He reads the rain and sears impressions of lightning in his heart
And he’s got a fine ear for the wind and the cracking thunder
And with his guitar the bluesman renders what he’s heard and seen
Into pictures and sounds and brooding songs of desolation and love
The bluesman sings of a loveless city
Where recalcitrance is a warning and not the other way around
The bluesman sings of angry streets crowded with angry strangers
He sings of angry neighbors hollering and cursing and wailing
And when he doesn’t sing he weeps and sobs and remembers
And after weeping and recollecting a very long past
And it’s the beginning he’d give anything to see again
There’s always his years of grieving
And there’s the resolution to give up all grieving soon
The bluesman sleeps the glorious sleep of angels in a boundless heaven
The bluesman sleeps the sleep of the angels because he’s died alone
His guitar and his singing have been his companions and his boon
And now that the bluesman is gone now that the singing is gone
The guitar is in its wooden case near the window facing east
This forlorn guitar that was the bluesman’s guitar
Fills the room with silence and shadows
And a dead man’s recalcitrance


© J.Noya, 2006