Natalia Sings the Blues

by
Elmo Lum

Natalia sings the blues. Isn’t that the purpose of rain? Crickets chirp, the windows are shut, who knows of who spoke of last. (Of what.) Can you imagine how the whirlpool draws helpless ships with helpless crews whitely pulling dripping lines and oars? The impenetrable future — that’s what. The center at which events are destined. When the waiting turns to realization and where sightless groping turns to the wall. (Here. Not here. There.)

How the relative humanity of the thrice-turned lyrics makes the substance that is the subject of it. The piercing of words with the atmosphere of that part burrows to the hearts of honest men. (Hmm, it goes.) Did you (or would you) go in like fashion, clear, effectively nude, to destinations truthful, lost, and lacking any key? Some do, some not. A party flies this manner of living, this philosophy of ego draped and labeled as such (but not as such) for keepers of fire from burning end. Failure is the sole option, according to the measure of time. Length, measurable or immeasurable, is always a finite length.

Listen: here’s what the words mean, here’s the nut of the lyric: the truth is in the past but not the future. And the future will always beat down the past. Fully and unexceptionally. A note, a throat, a syllable’s draw, the pull of what’s made-up noise. (Overflowing beyond what remains still a note, a throat, a syllable.) But time is fixed, prone to splitting, tending toward fractions, gently stepping implacably toward every plotted ending. Rent comes due. Insight swings: the yearling’s wobble, the finger’s touch, the deadened phase of right maturity (and knowledge of ungrippable loss).

Do songs end? Do they peter, do they halt, or do they fade, or do they ice, or is it not the song but singing that comes to end? Does she know of what she does, is she guilty in the senseful sense of knowingly fixing something timely in time? (Forsaken.) Gray (or if you like, grey) comes the pause that colors to stopping, jilting one’s hurtful episodes briefly to nether lands. Quip and sneer, why do we do, should we not present ourselves in fronted reverie to stiffened circumstance? Yes — justice is a notion. Natalia checks the blues, quits the voicing, leaves the tribe comprised of those for whom cheer is a victim. (As aren’t we all, after all, victims of heartless age?) But no — not yet. And yet. But yet: who among us will dictate?