Collection

Under lowering dawn skies like winegrapes shot with veins of hot yellow A high Crescent City moon could not distend her beams on the town below

No helpful light shone inside the dark storm circle whose scything edge Sickled flat the swamp tupelos sunk the fisher's bateau neath the sedge

A water Hell that blew out well baffles bent float derricks at the knees Hurled hundred-year-cypress over drowned bayous at a city of fleur-de-lis

In the Big and Too Easy, voodoo dolls bob in a flooded church celestory And those sad caught on rooftops watch the ghastly parade of memento mori

Only wondering why

Why? Where big rivers conflux the sea there will always be a port of call So too if deepwater energy is to be found jackknife rigs reek of methanol

Life ebbs and flows where the wet brown land of Evangeline meets Gulf surge Acadian man and immutable economics uneasy forgather just upon that verge

Each forgetting that ever anon the restless foam driven by searching wind Roars up from Barataria across The Quarter measuring alike foe and friend

Who yesterday gaily bedecked for Fat Tuesday gamboled on the trolley ground Now thinking on this, the wisest on their housetop peak waiting to be found

Only wonder when