Spanish Town Porch

It occurs to me as I watch the January rain come down
in hard, grey Saturday afternoon sheets,

That I have loved these streets with
their damp laughter and dusty sighs,
I have savored moments spent under
this skeletal canopy, with its thin silvery specters
so many ghosts crowded into an empty doorway,
peering down in silence at laughing couples running
hand-in-hand down January’s crooked sidewalk,
the call of calliope in pursuit of them

as they rush towards dry rooms and warm kisses.

The St. Charles Line
She sits in a quiet reverence,
a sack of groceries at her side,
riding the St.Charles line home
as she has done every day now
for almost forty years.

The route is mapped out before her,
sights and sound memorized
like the worn photos of her wedding day.
A strange comfort, these clanks and hums,
these breaks in the neutral ground.
She crosses herself as the churches pass by,
hands as delicate and soft as tissue,
as brown as the leaves on the trees passing by
in the bleak light of a late november afternoon
Oak, magnolia and willow,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.