Frankie shot Johnny.
We Americans have had to borrow rue from our slaves; they have enough,
and to spare
We call it blues--and the origin's appropriate to us.
The child in his cradle listens to locomotives talking themselves up
the long grades, bidding the counties farewell in the night.
Ours is a civilization of pistons, motors turning, electrons peppering
filaments into light. We are
a racy people.
We got rhythm.
The tempo of our love and the momentum of our woe are one.
Our exultation soars with edifices that scrape the sky--then falters
underground where we have iron rivers to carry the people home--and
there is no home when they get there but only the percussant streets
again, the shooting tabernacles, the radiance, the tumult in time.
We sleep.
Morning comes.
In the mammoth sunshine of our cities we remember our blues the way the
slaves remember.
No heart, no intellect, but we got rhythm!
Look at the towers!
Look at the sky--that's blue, too, baby!
The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections
regular. The shadows are geometry--they dive one hundred stories. It
is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there,
concrete and rectilinear.
This
we call traffic.
It is the way we move on the board.
Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the
Christmas-colored signals. We are a great, free, democratic people
whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization,
eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down
the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of
commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to
Pittsburgh.
We rate fireflies in kilowatts.
But we hate to see the evening sun go down.
Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So--our hills, the evening in our
thoroughfares, our dying lips.
Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it
in brass! We put
pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness!
We take a breath of our American air and we-the-people burst.
That's blues!
The mood would have led to God knows what charade in the auditorium
of my senses--the multitude of watching, listening "mes" reacting in
all their various ways at once; it might have become a ululation you
could have heard on Mars--or frozen as if the head of Medusa had come
on stage--or, by that third unanimity, blazed into laughter, revolted
ecstasy at ecstasy itself.
The singing woman stopped.
There was a knock.