XXX Bonafide or St. Louis Cemetery No.1


Palms and oleanders grow in the shell-rich soil between crumbling tombs--
the mausoleum  style is nearly ubiquitous here,
or its precursor, the so-called oven-grave:
as one body decomposes, it is pressed to the back wall and another cadaver is fed through the opening.

A dry styx, this.
Chrysanthemums bloom in vases, eternal non-native mourners,
and wreaths of white silk flowers, rust-colored and mottled from dust and rain.
A few tourists mill and couples dressed like specters link arms, a violinist wanders looking lost.
He brings bow to strings, but thinks better of it and relents.

The soft crunch of our feet through the stones reigns,
and strains of zydeco coming from downtown.
They’ve showered the graves in untidy gestures: flasks, fans, beaded necklaces tossed in handfuls-- Doggerel scrawled on tomb walls and everybody speaking for the dead.

Voodoo churches are filled with quotidian offerings and more arcane talismans:
halloween candy in dishes shouldered up against shrunken heads under bell-jars.
Drawers full of teeth.
Paper dolls with ink across the eyes.

The priestess Miriam sits in her shady courtyard like a queen in blue sandals
with a wave of her hand, as though to dispel a dream or maybe just the heat.
She and other ghosts of New Orleans, the shadow of the Tioga,
its wide back window with the world spilling out,
the breeze in my hair,
the hundred-year-old magnolias twisting up through the soil and the carnivalesque park signs,
the chain link fence and the dogs chained to it,
the caw of the jackdaw and the crow.

Our lost violinist finds the dark-eyed couple and marries them, invoking apocryphal magic. 
To each their omen, blanched and painfully real under the white sun,
our lungs thick with the smell of chicory coffees and over-sugared beignets,
the French-quarter is ripe and rotting.

with dried vomit on the pavement, with wafts of cigar smoke, with our sagging, thrusting flesh--
all of it bathed in the close and musky air rising cool off the Mississippi.
These graves are marked with the triple Xes of vigilant believers,
hope for us dirt-scratchers, temples to burlesque saints.