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.