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| gray bayou. somewhere between baton rouge and new orleans. january, 2014. |
laughing, that's right
yes they were, they were
laughing them in, laughing
at prairie dog town fork
when the soaking rains came
and laughing as they skimmed
over the red river mark,
bluewings in the flyway
funneling into the sun,
onward to the gulf they flew
on their way home to galveston.
yesterday as today
some didn't stay, some strayed
but most were homeward bound—
or trying to discover such a place
as you, dear ones—and yearned
for rest near the bayous
in the years when
an ocean of big bluestem
waved
and land-locked mariners
rolled
in prairie schooner flotillas
that blazed new trails in the grasses.
rasps, sighs, barks—palm, pine, shorebird—
joined the clicks and moans
of freewinging above
corridors of flatwoods, clear
freeflowing
channels
lovely ones, you remain—many did not—
secure in your sugar palace
in the company of the fittest oaks
shrouded
in moss, dark linked
arm-in-arm
with the others, equals free at last
you flit the night air over shadow gardens,
whip over batture, over bound mississippi
a land disfigured, levee swollen
witness an iliad of loss;
what does losing mean, losing
your hundred thousand acres, the taste
of beeless honey in your mouth
losing yourself and all
yesterdays and tomorrows, colorblind
days indistinguishable blend
no longer circle dancing with sun and moon.
i too will unlearn that
and this: the difference, little birds, between
when we played with our mothers' cast-offs
played we know better, grown-up is better
how we longed to be like them, to speed up time
to be like them, we thought we had
all the time in the world
and when that black & white dream dissolved into
awareness of your alluvial caress, you
washed over me like the grains of sand and soil
that crumbled and bled out of your saccharum fields
and rose again in riverbed waves of mud
breaking me routinely, routinely hypnotizing me
your breathing a sound that was silence
scattering my thoughts piece by piece
you put me together again
o beautiful blackness, together we glide
though you don't light long enough.
my senses long to interrupt
the perennial part of amaranthine stillness
i struggle to hear the sere reed, interpret
the raw glaze tuning your throat
but everything's garbled, the connection obscured.
About This Poem
While in Texas, I was thinking about how the Texas prairie was lost, lost like so many people, in a relatively short time. Scientists, environmentalists, and other individuals who recognize the benefits of prairie grass and wetland habitats along the Central Flyway are working to bring a little bit of prairie back to the Houston area. Driving down the coast of Louisiana, you don't have to go far to find a ghost or two. I recently got to know a few on their own turf, around the sugar plantations near the Mississippi River, and added them to my personal circle of ghosts. Water, wind, birds, live oaks, sugarcane, native grasses—where you find these, you will also find the other ones. They seem to belong out there with the natural world they once roamed (not in creepy crypts or dark alleys—New Orleans can keep those!), nature and spirit no longer lost to each other, but reunited. So that's what I did, brought them together again.
