Friday Poetry: New Orleans Apology

An occasional feature on Fridays to go along with fiction, Friday poetry.  Here's an old poem from my time in the Delta.  It's a long poem, lots of verse after the jump.  I hope you like it.  Poets, submit your stuff, we'll post it to our growing blog audience.

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New Orleans Apology

Joseph M. Schreiber

 

Maybe in the dead of some different night

I could explain her away;

have you understand if not forgive.

I’d tell of love lost in time crossed

and porch lights in the rain;

of mamas cooking and kudzu dying with cane liquor in the dark;

the peace of my back against her breasts in fitful May heat –

moonlight trapping our skin in the shadows

of her past and my future, settling into the comfort

of our bodies’ perfect fit in sleep.

I could lead you through dark rows after picking

to a jailhouse window, cheek pressed to tinted glass –

a shackled child come down from rage

and tell you: yesterday I taught him to read.

I’d tell you of too many funerals,

and the stories of the killers, but not of the dead;

of riots, and after, warm dinners in control rooms

watching over basketball games in razor-wire topped courts.

I’d tell you their street names, the times they laughed so hard they cried,

the times I had to beat them and they tried to die.

I’d tell you of mamas braiding hair in whispered tones

of lawyers and pistol whippings,

of sixteen year-old girls’ babies breast-feeding through orange jumpsuits,

the track mark poem seared up my arm

the first time I heard a young girl weep:

“my brother had sex with me

and oh God I cried.

My brother, he held me

when I was a little girl,

and oh God I cried.

Oh God, everybody knows,

and I cry.”

Later in the night, with whiskey softened lips

I could describe the macabre play where old men search dumpsters

for cans, preachers in three-piece suits ride by on old bicycles

and pit bulls run free.  Children sleep beside bulletproof glass

while simple conversations go on –

idle glances to a helicopter passing low,

news shouted up to jailhouse windows

and Jonestown Saturday nights where ghettos burn

and wheelchairs turn, crossing tracks out of the flames.

Maybe in a pool hall’s smoke-cut light I’d have the courage

to tell you of late nights watching gray demons walk the levee,

hearing them sing the staccato rhythm of twin barrels,

the dirge of the beaten and the dead,

hackles raised to the call of hunger.

The next morning a Moon Lake submission baptism –

the saved in white robes browning in the water

while vipers rested wreaking in cypress root’s shade.

II.

In the midst of that February when our love was breathing slow,

she and I fell into each other.

That piece of my heart kept hidden from you so long sat naked

in the middle of her gaze.  She and I danced slowly

around the edges of our taboos and she let me bathe

away her fear of my skin, easing her back to my chest

in the scalding water’s steam as the candle shone bare

our shadows across the tile and I cupped water down her temples.

Well past midnight our bodies sighed

in the silence only winter can bring.

Then we lay still and I memorized the rise of her cheekbone.

She held my leg in the spoon of her thighs,

knowing even then the exact night I’d leave her town alone.

III.

Buddy Guy cried Delta Blues through sultry smoke cut light,

sitting in the empty room, repeating

between pulls and the pipe smoke’s dark dancing,

“I think I’m leaving in the morning and your cryin’,

your cryin’ won’t help you now.”

Waiting for the phone to ring and the apology

begun in New Orleans

when I carried her heart six hours South

and dropped it off in Baton Rouge;

she afraid of Pontchartrain hoodoo,

but the spell had been cast between 911 calls courting.

Kissing her eyes shut as children burned

in Sibley Quarters, catching her tears

in my Clarksdale home six hours later –

cracked voice crying what we both knew weren’t quite lies,

saying, “Yes, I’ll hear your voice in my dreams.”

“Yes” at 4 a.m. when time always stands still.

Saturday on Carondelet, a jazz parade and old friends’ easy laughter.

We walked towards the lights of Algiers

then sat silent over chicory, nodding to the statue of broken promises.

Two 4 a.m.’s later, she kissed me with sobbing lips

and told me the truths of her night,

tracing the map on my back,

showing the place her three children reside,

showing past lives grown and spent,

working down my spine to the eight weeks away

when I’d leave alone.

Then she pulled my hand to her thigh

and showed the fire lit that frightened

her into shedding my tears

in my bed

            While in the background Buddy wept:

“Darlin’ you know, you know you done me wrong.”

IV

As the days till gone drew closed

she clasped my neck harder and kept my cheek

to her cheek - pulling down my earlobe with her teeth –

warm salt on our skin, both grasping for that small bit of peace

holding tight in the chaos grown to callous.

That last night I sat with the dead phone,

pipe and blues, waiting out the hour before dawn –

maybe hoping, maybe praying for the New Orleans apology

never come; never giving full release

from the gravity we gave to our lives.