Preacher Man

How can they resist, when
the good book burns in you
like a runaway fire
that devours everything not hot
and feverish
like you?
You pound the pulpit—
hurl your words out
like small stones of sanctification.
You seek out and condemn
the evil in the wicked, who fill your pews
and you spit out your absolutions
like holy waters.
But after the choir sings the last heavenly note
and hang up their robes—
after the repentant sinners file out,
you come to me and plead in your little-boy voice
to let you lay with me.
You touch my subservient body
with your ministering hands
soft as a fugue. Your fervid fingers
fall upon my youthfulness with sinful glee.
You pound the mattress until dust devils
float up in shafts of celestial sunlight
and your hallelujahs rain down on us
like lava.
How can I resist such a wicked fire?
How can I resist such obscene pleasure?

Iconoclast

Spain—David hangs a crucifix
upside down on his apartment wall.
Beneath it the Rolling Stones
express sympathy for the devil
next to a picture of “mother’s little pills”
cut out of a medical magazine.
When the Spanish cleaning lady sees it,
she crosses herself and runs to the local policia.
“Madre del dios. He is the devil.
Lives on the thirteenth floor.”
The police point out to her that
There is no 13th floor apartment
It is the 14th. She shakes her head.
“The devil can count, you idiots.”

(E)scape Goat
(From the goat’s point of view)

If it is to be my lot,
Saddle me with your Hebrew transgressions.
I am but a dumb beast that knows
Nothing of such matters. But I feel
The burning weight on my back, and
No amount of bucking or butting or biting
Will shake it loose.
If it is to be my lot,
Let me escape
Into the wilderness
Where Aaron, that smart,
Smooth-tongued confessor,
And purveyor of sins
Fears to tread.
If it is to be my lot, let me be banished forever
Among the trees.
The sins are not so heavy there.
Among the trees sin is a foreign word
And all the beasts are as dumb as I.

Paul Harvey in Chatagnier

Paul Harvey’s off-beat delivery
over the old wine-colored tube radio
punctuates our lunch like clockwork.
His “Hello Americans” is aural dessert.
Daddy picks his teeth and nods
to the words of wisdom Paul Harvey
feeds us with the confidence and alacrity
only a radio personality can have.
Sometimes Daddy comments—
brings Harvey’s editorials home
to our sharecropper’s shack.
Momma uses the time to work.
Her hands never stop not even for Paul Harvey.
She shucks corn, irons clothes, mends garments—
Harvey’s radio voice like music in the background.
Madeline and I sit on the worn linoleum.
We play jacks or try to imagine
Paul Harvey’s world—so far away
from our living room, our shack
in the middle of Monsieur Alcide’s farm,
not far from Chataignier, where nothing ever
happens that Paul Harvey
chooses to talk about.

Nasty like War Blues

This is not a religious crusade.
This is not a war. So don’t
Call in the army or the president.
I have the blues people, and it
clings to me like a big bad bruise.
I don’t care if the oil don’t flow.
I don’t care if Arab kills Arab
kills Jew, kills white or black
or me or you. I just don’t care
people. I got the blues. You
won’t see me rattle my saber
or wear my flag on my pickup.
You won’t see me line up to give
blood to the Red Cross either.
I’m afraid I’d give someone blue
blood. You won’t see me thump
my chest and jump up on my soapbox
calling for the annihilation of evil,
or terror, or whatever ill is fracturing
us today. No, sir. Not me.
I got the blues, heavy like lead blues.
Listen, people, and I’ll tell you how it is.
I’m gonna turn off my t.v. and
keep my feet on the ground. I got
no place to go—no place I wanta be.
I’m Gonna crank up my c.d. and listen
to some Otis and some Percy.
I’m gonna wrap the blues
round me and wear it like a flag.
And anyone who wants me,
come hell or heaven, red or white,
good or bad is gonna have to
dive in both barrels blasting
cause I got the blues, people—
the nasty like war blues.

Nighttime in the Barnyard

When it is nighttime in the barnyard,
the heat and smell of manure permeates; hangs
in the air like humidity. Mosquitoes flit
feverishly from animal to animal sampling the fare.
Bulls bellow like broken bassoons. Horses snort
and stomp to chase away nightmares. Sheep gather
in groups and count whiny bleats in sleepy monotonous strings.
Insomnious barn sparrows twitter timorously
among empty rafters, while scavenger mice scurry
through the pokeberry, the thistle, and the blood weed
that grow in thickets behind the moon-bleached barn.
When it is nighttime in the barnyard, roosters dream
about banjo clucking chickens and the boar ignores
the boisterous barking of the barnyard hound
as he chases about kicking up dust
that floats up in stuffy white clouds and settles
heavily on the junky John Deere parked under
the Chinaberry tree.
When it is nighttime in the barnyard, the lazy drift
of the red-tail hawk across the brittle blue sky
is mere memory.
When it is nighttime in the barnyard, the moon
burns coldly in the pig trough and the farmer
snores snuggly next to his wife while the a.c.
hums a cooling lullaby.

Mason Jar Minnow

It rarely freezes hard in Louisiana,
so the Mason jar minnow
Madeline and I kept on the back porch
stayed out in single digit
temperature. Next morning,
our breaths smoking in the crisp air,
we found the minnow frozen
in a block of ice.
Momma muttered a dead pet
prayer and we went on with
the rest of our day. When the sun
came out and breathed life into
the frozen day, its rays fell upon
the Mason jar and the ice
slowly melted. The minnow
drew on the warmth and came alive
again. Momma said it was a
miracle, a message from God.
I don’t remember arguing with her,
but I knew his resurrection was no
miracle. Already I knew that
life was tenacious—that no mere
block of ice could kill
what didn’t want to die.
The miracle was
that the jar didn’t break.

The Nuclear Roach

The biology professor
said that if there ever
was a nuclear holocaust,
the lowly roach would surely
survive. I stopped
daydreaming about the blonde
in front of me long enough
to register what he said.
That night I captured
the biggest roach I
could find under my
cabinets, and placed him
under a glass in
the microwave.
I nuked him on high
for thirty seconds. The
son-of-a-bitch survived.
He flicked his antennae
at me and resumed his trek
across the glass, seemingly
unperturbed.
I was afraid to set
a nuclear roach free,
so I lifted the glass
and swatted him flat with
a fly swatter.

Forteana

I heard that
a deluge of frogs
swamped a town in Georgia, once—
that snakes slithered down from heaven
and bedeviled a village in Mexico—
that a tornado of ladybugs
entombed a house in Arkansas—
and black clouds disgorged a storm of alligators
through a neighborhood of roofs in Louisiana.
The clouds are heavy this morning,
hugely distorted and threatening—
a good day to stay indoors and write poetry.

The Winter Nap

When I awoke from my winter nap
The bears stared down at me.
The stars had long fallen.
The sun stood high in the sky
When I awoke from my winter nap.
The beds were unmade,
The gruel had congealed,
And the chairs were bottomed out
When I awoke from my winter nap.
When I awoke from my winter nap
I begged the bears’ forgiveness—
Threw myself at their paws.
I swore by the sun above
When I awoke from my winter nap
That I would never sleep again.
All my dreams disappeared—
Ran like tree sap.
When I awoke from my winter nap,
The stars had long fallen.

Breaking Water

The searchers found my man’s
pirogue floating
under Interstate 10—
his crawfish nets
empty and dry.
The Atchafalya Swamp
swallowed my man—
took him whole—
fed him
to the fish and alligators—
digested what was left,
and spread his spirit
from Morganza
to Morgan City.
I drank the water
when they told me
until I was saturated—
until it poured out of me
in sweat, piss and vomit.
Now, I rub my pregnant belly—
feel my man’s child in me—
no bigger than a fish.
I feel him flounder around
in the birthing water. I hope
he does not drown
like his daddy did. I hope
he does not die
like his daddy did.
When my baby breaks water
and joins me on dry land,
I will take him to the swamp
edge and dip my hand
in the murky mixture.
I will let the water drip
into his tiny mouth
drop by holy drop.

Prop Roots

They don’t reflect traditional
family values. Phil resides in
Atlanta. Susan manages
a computer store in San
Francisco and commutes
from Menlo Park. Little Alex
studies zoology at a
college in Lafayette.
Larry, the father, lives in
Fairfax and shuffles paper in
Washington. Sarah lives
alone in Savannah.
Ten years ago she
divorced Larry, citing
irreconcilable differences.
She raised the kids
on her own—never asked
her ex for one penny
of child support.
Phil married Phyllis from
Phoenix. They held the
reception in Sarah’s
modest split level—
the crowd spilled out into
the yard under a mustard moon.
Susan became a lesbian and
moved in with Melissa.
The family nearly split over that
until Sarah offered them
the voice of reason: a
sister is a sister.
She kissed Melissa full
on the mouth and welcomed
her to the family. Little Alex,
the educated one, hated
to leave his mother’s
nest until she pushed him out.
Larry joined the family
one Thanksgiving,
unannounced and uninvited.
Sarah opened her doors
to him and the family
feasted. When he left
again, he thanked Sarah.
Their
roots are exposed, but
the family grows
propped up safely in
Sarah’s bosom.

Lady in a Bank

She had no money—lived in the old bank building,
which had shut down during the depression.
bricks made good walls, warm in winter,
cool in summer. She was as ageless as the building:
copper-colored skin, smooth like a freshly minted dollar bill—
sad dark eyes, testaments to the hardships of her past.
She had a son, who ran away at fifteen—escaped to make his fortune in the city,
where banks offered money and not shelter for poor widow ladies.
He visited from Chicago, once.
He hooked up an eight millimeter projector and showed her images
of a Middle Class Black family on her brick wall:
infants, growing up on celluloid. She blinked
with the light—wiped damp eyes as her son packed up the projector and ran away again
to the house full of family she would never really know.
She died as quietly as she lived. Her son flew in from Chicago.
Camera ready, he recorded wake, mass, procession, burial and
played it back once to his family on a white wall in his rich suburban home.
The town tore down the old bank shortly after she died.
It had long outgrown its worth. They left nothing except a pile of dust
and smooth copper-colored bricks picked over by scavengers until only a scar remained.

The Pew Before Me

While you sit in the pew before me,
I stare at the fine hairs on your porcelain neck—
O beautiful holy land—
And dream of things I would like to see.
I watch you cup your hands—
Send God your reverent apostrophe—
I dream that I kneel before you and offer you my hand
While you sit in the pew before me.
Father Mahieu lifts the chalice up
And prays silently
You bow your head on command
And dream of things I would like to see.
When mass is over, the priest exits to the sacristy—
I lean forward and tap your shoulder—
My heart beating like a jazz band—
While you sit in the pew before me.
You turn and say, yes, in a small voice, saintly sweet.
I choke back the words—
My hopes disband—
And dream of things I would like to see
Suppose I told you how much you meant to me—
Screwed my courage up and took your hand
While you sit in the pew before me,
Would you tell me the things you would like to see?

Kathy O

Sixteen candles, like miniature smokestacks,
jut out of the white birthday cake.
The party is in the Home Economics building
decorated with posters of pecan pies and pasta casseroles,
all cooked to perfection.
In the area across from the small faux kitchen
Chubby Checkers rocks the record player
sitting on the maple sideboard next to the matching dining table.
An imitation of Ruisdael’s A Stormy Sea
hangs above it all, threatening and dangerous
Kathy O stands watch on the edge of the Moroccan rug
in the faux living room. She sways and twists
her hips to the music. Her sweet prow pitches and tosses.
O, what a sight. It is fitting
that I see her in this domestic setting
for I imagine I will marry her. She will not be the
perfect bride—curlers in her hair, morning breath,
cold casseroles—but the sex will be steamy hot.
I navigate the crowd of dancers striking for her
but I stop short.
During Kathy O’s twisting and gyrating
one of her breasts has broken from it’s mooring
and hangs a good three inches lower than the other.
The word dives from one party-goer to another
like morsels for pesky sea gulls:
Kathy O’s falsies have fallen.
O, the storm that will brew when
Kathy learns about the slippage.
O, how the seas will part
when she plows through the crowd,
one mammilla hanging hard alee and the other luff.

King Cotton Versus The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Shirley and Loretta
sing Elvis songs,
Hound Dog,
Don’t be Cruel,
All Shook Up.
Momma joins in,
out of tune, while the rest of us
pick cotton bolls in rhythm.
There is no king in that field
unless it’s the cotton—
heavy in the morning
feather-light in the afternoon.
At a penny a pound,
it doesn’t pay to pick
when the sun is hot.
But that’s when
Shirley and Loretta are at their best.
The notes float from row
to row, blues heavy
filling our heads in time to dancing hands
until King Cotton yields
to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll
and the only cruelness in that field
is the hot sun beating on our backs,
and the end of the rows
when the singing stops.

Cancer

The cancer shrunk Daddy—
skin stretched taught
over bones until he looked
like a victim of Auschwitz or Dachau—
the same confused and bewildered look in his eyes
as prisoners staring through barbed wire fences.
He cried one night,
head resting on Momma’s chest,
“I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want to die.”
Momma patted him on the back
like she did to me when I had a bad nightmare
and she couldn’t do anything about it.
“There, there,” she chanted
Like a Sunday prayer.

Pushing Plow
(for my daddy)

When the air is sweat heavy and the sky is smoky blue—
When cotton rows are endless and the scorched earth burns bare feet—
When the sun beats down and makes blackberry bushes droop—
When flies and mosquitoes join together and will not shoo–-
When red-tail hawks sit on poles and cease sharp-eyed surveillance—
When ornery mules won’t pull and you have to push the plow,
Then it is time to seek the cool, sweet Magnolia shade,
And dream of other places where the sun’s gentle shining
Warms and sustains souls and crops; where mules are obedient
And always do as they’re told and long cotton rows are made
In the blink of an eye; where hardships disappear behind
Nature’s gentle breezes and the plow is just an ornament.

Hurricane Audrey—1957

From the open doorway
I watch the clouds gather.
The horizon is black—blue black
like the finish on Daddy’s shotgun.
Daddy stands among the mature
cotton plants. His dark shape
snatches the fluffy white bolls
before the wind takes them.
He stuffs them in the yawning mouth
of his cotton sack. Two more rows
to go before he can come in
out of the approaching storm.
The clouds roil forward
dwarf everything I can see—
the cotton field, Memere’s house
Monsieur Alcide’s barn, Daddy too.
The house groans under the low
threatening clouds. The wind
slaps the screen door open.
The blackness swallows the daylight.
I can’t see Daddy anymore.
Momma lights the kerosene lantern
the light tunnels into the darkness—
grabs Daddy’s bent figure.
It pulls him into the safety
of the house and my small arms.
Daddy wipes away my hot tears—
tells me that everything is all right.
I feel the house shutter.
I hear the trees snap under
the force of the deadly storm
and the fear will not go.
Momma huddles us in the kitchen
next to the soot-blackened fireplace
and Daddy tells us stories
about other storms that he survived.
The wind rages outside
but it does not drown out
Daddy’s weatherproof words.
It does not extinguish the lantern light.
I study Daddy’s weather beaten
face, half covered in dark shadows.
I am comforted to see in it
a force equal to the raging blackness outside.

The Orphan Train Orphan
(for Jessie Caitlin and Lawrence III—from their grandfather’s point of view)

Mother,
what could you have been thinking?
What thought sliced through your head
when you handed my infant body, still wet from your fluids,
to the nuns?
Did you feel regret?
Remorse?
Contrition?
Did you feel a connection
between me and the pain?
What did you say to the nuns;
“Go on. Take him. He’s yours,”
like you were giving up a thing
that has collected dust
from disuse.
Or did you let go of me,
unwillingly,
like the amputee relinquishes a limb?
Did you feel them slice through the cord?

Cajun Folklore 101, Section 02

3 credit hours
John Babineaux, professeur
Foreign Language Department
My Cajun Folklore Professor told us that
We should be proud of who we were.
We should be proud of what we had become.
We should be proud of our language.
We should be proud of our symbols.
Je suis Cajun.
By God
I have seen the language disappear in classrooms
designed to assimilate all little Cajun speakers
into américains, complete with capitalist heroes and ambitions.
I have seen lumber companies raze the great cypresses
In the Atchafalya Swamp, until all that is left of the soi disant eternal wood, are a few lifeless logs buried under dark alluvial mud.
I have seen ancient moss-covered oaks fall in the name of Progress
and Subdivision, where houses spring up from the earth
like cruel imitations of the life they supplant.
I have seen schools of fish float face up in our bayous,
which reek of unknown Poisons and Chemicals.
I have seen Mardi Gras become a parade of
Drunkenness and Debauchery.
I have seen the Cajun and Zydeco music
sell Cars and Fried Chicken.
I have seen South Louisiana invaded by Oil Companies
with their Derricks, thick as trees on the horizon.
I have seen outsiders, followers of the Petrol Dollar,
feed upon the culture like buzzards feasting on carrion.
I asked Professeur Babineaux if the live oak was a symbol of my heritage.
He said yes.
I asked him if the bayou was a symbol of my heritage.
He said yes.
I asked him if the cypress was a symbol of my heritage.
He said yes.
I asked him if the oil derrick was a symbol of my heritage.
He said yes.
Je suis Cajun, by God.

I dropped Cajun Folklore 101 that semester.

The Duncery

Prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no
free and splendid wit can flourish. John Milton

The time my first grade teacher
stuck a dunce cap on my head
and told me to sit in a corner
for speaking Cajun during recess,
I burned with humiliation.
The second time she placed me in the corner,
I burned with indignation.
The third time she did so,
I burned with defiance.

God is Cajun

There was a Cajun man,
who couldn’t read or write
but who could make an accordion sing.
He’d sit on his front gallery,
prop his chair back,
and pump that accordion
until sun gave way to dusk, to moon.
He was not a lonely man although
he never met a woman who could sing
as beautiful as his old Monarch.
The sound left him as breathless
as airless bellows.
When he died, an old man asleep in his bed,
the accordion lay by his side.
The parish buried him in an unmarked grave
in a corner of the cemetery.
Someone placed the scratched and arthritic instrument
in the cheap pine coffin with him.
In the evening, when moon and sun
share the heavens, you can hear
his accordion melody float over the conflux
of earthborn souls.
I heard the melody,
one moon-filled evening,
borne upon a warm summer breeze,
weaving among freshly white-washed tombstones.
I felt it’s uplifting tug and I knew
that God not only existed,
but he was Cajun

“(E)scape Goat,” first appeared in Niedermgasse, December 1998