On lines from Walker Percy
(1)
still burning
sky over Gentilly
it is easily overlooked
strange island
the slightest interest
New Orleans
sags like rotten lace
behind high walls
a week before Mardi Gras
warm wind
and bearing it
the street looks tremendous
devotion
commencing to make a fire
the very sound of winter mornings
streaming with tears
the mantelpiece
an evening gown
against the darkening sky
so pleasant and easy
old world
gone to
Natchez
a houseboat on Vermillion
more extraordinary
the sky
into her upturned face
her eyes
a soundless word
ample and mysterious
a litter of summers past
(2)
a fresh wind
transfigures everyone
stray bits and pieces
not distinguishable
a peculiar thing
August sunlight
streaming
in yellow bars
the mystery
of those summer afternoons
the islands in the south
going under
such a comfort
a corner of the wall
enclosed
shallow and irregular
the happiest moment
the oddness of it
Carrollton Avenue
early in the evening
like a seashell
her fingers on the zinc bar
cold and briney
like a boy who has come into a place
already moved
(3)
inside the wet leaves
the smell of coffee
the Tchoupitoulas docks
Negro men carry children
measuring
the flambeaux bearers
showering sparks
“Ah now!”
maskers
like crusaders
leaning forward
whole bunches of necklaces
that sail
toward us on horseback
loose in the city
the entire neighborhood
possible
somewhere
(4)
simulacrum of a dream
like a sore tooth
commoner than sparrows
celebrating the rites of spring
yellow-cotton smell
thumb-smudge over Chef Menteur
sculling
the bright upper air
the world is all sky
a broken vee
suddenly white
the tilting salient of sunlight
diesel rigs
glowing like rubies
nothing better
evenings
over Elysian Fields
who really wants to listen
in the thick singing darkness
cottonseed
in a streetcar
an accidental repetition
her woman’s despair
a little carcass
a kiss on the mouth
not even
the earth has memories of winter
(5)
the sidewalks, anyhow
virginal, as
perfect lawns
fog from the lake
seeing the footprint on the beach
a queer thing
tunneled by
new green shoots
black earth
the very words
full of pretty
snapshots
connive with me
down the levee
a drift of honeysuckle
oil cans
forget about women
the sunshine
along her thigh
the tiny fossa
saved me
facet and swell
tilting her head
far away as Eufala
Writing
South Louisiana
, a Note on the Process
Nomad, belonging accidentally and always at some remove to the places I find myself inhabiting, how root into these places, shift from being outside or between? Neither here nor there. After living eleven years in south Louisiana, drawn to the richness of its cultures, landscape, and history, painfully aware of the human brutality and environmental crises comprised therein, the sustained, willful political short-sightedness, I sought a language of place that could complicate as well as deploy the contradictory experiences of attachment and alienation without falling into the tropes of “awe/wonder”—othering the world of which we are inevitably, inextricably a part—and angry didacticism. I turned to extant texts: Florula Ludoviciana, an 1807 flora of the state first published in Paris by C. C. Robin and then in English with emendations by Constantine Rafinesque,EPA reports, reportage from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the BP Oil Macondo blowout (2010), oral histories, and novels written and set in south Louisiana, among many sources. Of the latter, I drew upon Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, perhaps the quintessential novel of
New Orleans
, or at least white
New Orleans
of a particular moment, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, from which these pieces are derived. Attending to passages in which particulars of place were most evident, I isolated these as source-material. Cutting and juxtaposing short phrases (each line-break is an intact cut from the original) to create texts that afforded a means of writing about place, healing to a degree the otherness of my outsider status and perhaps in other ways, highlighting it, while also foregrounding language. These cut-ups move sequentially forward in the source texts and juxtapose an urban experience with a rural one. The cutting technique gave permission to write about south
Louisiana
, affording a way in to this place, which is simultaneously mine and not mine at all.