Chattanooga, Tennessee River Aubade - For Willie After A Night Of Powder Dancing,1975 Poem by Warren Falcon

an asterisk * denotes a footnote beneath the poem

[NOTE - see the note below the poem about powder dancing, what it was, hopefully still is somewhere in rural towns or back streets in jaded cities where merriment and more could thrive without censure or worse]


for Willie, an old man come to sit on my front porch, Third Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee, street Bessie Smith* grew up on...he taught me how to powder dance and more, bottle of Old Mister Boston Apricot Brandy passing between us, humidity so thick we smell the river late nights where we sat, then danced -

And our feet did dance.
And the flour stayed down
the whole summer long.

I
Next morning, more likely early afternoon,

Willie long gone, I awaken sprawled on the penitent porch—a cool concrete floor my sinner's bench—sweaty and thick as pan gravy, mosquito bitten, marinaded in Tennessee night mists.

I stagger into the living room onto the ghostly floor what's powdery white, 'stroked' with two attached, or close to, sets of foot prints' heel slides and smears — Jackson Pollock meets Tibetan sand painting 'yazzed' yantra'**— cigarette ashes flicked into the impermanent mix.

2
Dear Willie, I've not powder danced since when,
when we drank discovering oral history's joys,
opened up eager ears and fraternal arms forgetting
fears of religion and race, our wide age gap, and
expressed hard pressed Desire's multilingual disseminations.

From our many nights I know that wheat is
anciently sacred but even more so now for
flour, the sight and feel of it, its unbaked smell,
turns me again toward a Chattanooga Third
Street, its compass river swelling like bread
nearby bearing witness still for one cannot say
too much about rivers—

their irreverence of edges scored, spilling themselves

proclaiming natural gods deeper than memory yet
dependent upon it for traced they must be in every
human activity, no matter the breech, for something
there is to teach even deity though it may be wrong
to do so, or hearsay to say it or sing, but the song
is there for those whose ears are broken onto bottoms
from which cry urgencies of Being and between,
dutiful banks barely containing the straining Word.

____

* Bessie Smith (April 15,1894 - September 26,1937) was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the 'Empress of the Blues', she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Smith was young when her parents died, and she and her six siblings survived by performing on street corners. She began touring and performed in a group that included Ma Rainey, and then went out on her own. Her successful recording career with Columbia Records began in 1923, but her performing career was cut short by a car crash that killed her at the age of 43. - from Wikipedia. com site

**Yantra - from Tibetan Buddhism. Visual meditation device,
a Yantra functions as revelatory conduit of cosmic truths.