Buckdancer’s Choice

So I would hear out those lungs, The air split into nine levels, Some gift of tongues of the whistler In the invalid’s bed: my mother, Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations of one song; It is called Buckdancer’s Choice. For years, they have all been dying Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Of traveling minstrel shows; With them also an old woman Was dying of breathless angina, Yet still found breath enough To whistle up in my head A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel, An ex-slave who thrivingly danced To the ring of his own clashing light Through the thousand variations of one song All day to my mother’s prone music, The invalid’s warbler’s note, While I crept close to the wall Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break Through stratum after stratum of a tone Proclaiming what choices there are For the last dancers of their kind, For ill women and for all slaves Of death, and children enchanted at walls With a brass-beating glow underfoot, Not dancing but nearly risen Through barnlike, theatrelike houses On the wings of the buck and wing.