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Tag: new orleans

  • Katherine

    I miss Katherine from the Quarter
    That night above Street Chartres where she’s
    flinging cigarettes from the balcony
    for the bums and bros and biker boys below and she’s
    slinging sweat until the toss of her hair
    it
    slows
    like syrup against the railing, you know the kind,
    the
    syrup with some Southern Drawl, drawling to evaporation and she
    talks about the saints and the instruments she paints them on and 
    lights
    me up with her eyes like turpentine still
    glistening at Twenty with Seventy years of age,

    the number veils
    as she leans back to take in the Creole vista
     
    with cliffs of plaster and weatherboard canyons and gaslamp constellations,
    missing the Mississippi breeze that lights 
    Desire through Tennessee and takes my hand to say it all
    about the place where I know I’ll die, that, ‘Did you know, New Orleans
    was the Northernmost part of the Caribbean?’

    Green skies of night and revelation I laugh to feel
    the kiss on my neck as her lived-long hair turns 
    debutante
    and on my shoulder her mind wanders to 
    the days of never-minding the cobblestone
    the second lines and slow dances with pirates
    porting in from Galveston, lips whiskey-plush as below,
    the boys
    and bums,
    the biker boys all relight flung fags, then
    gleam upward at their Goddess with gratitude,
    as from filter, lip to lip they taste their saintly woman,
    my Katherine, the instrument
    and just for tonight
    the city itself.

  • on dryades street

    I had a smoke in the rain and a fella asked if I’m okay,
    said all was well, my man,
    I’m just coming from L.A.

  • dad chair II

    In my dad chair and at the beach,
    just south of Incubator Isle
    I found a parking spot on West Channel Road.

    Crotch-forward watching presence of boys with their volleyballs and lambskin speedos,
    dancing for pose the lot of them, though not one in particular,
    intimidated by the dude alone, ‘we will never be like him.’

    All the while,

    The sand’s ahead of me,
    the overlook from my balcony on Dumaine.

    I wonder, thirst,

    to swim in the bath of Sun and drown in each other’s moonlight,
    our names forgotten and tomorrow’s ‘You Said Something’s’

    before longing for the promised view, those parched dreams of you,

    in my dad chair and at the beach.