The Night Could Never Be So Pretty...

[Medusafern]

New Orleans No. 1


She thought she knew Decatur Street
would be terrain retained for drunks or angels -
the place where migrants covet death -
but find that living, suddenly,
isn't so frightening.
And think they might go on.

She thought that she could surface here.
Steal the dreaming from her mind
and make a poem out of river rocks,
of too many days and nights spent wanting
oblivion or a love that could not stop -
and hoped that vampires loitered there -
and came to see that this was all
so dumb of her.

Was it only ever for her finding peace?
Some kind of impossible release
from a life turned strangely wrong -
and always the rumours that she had made it so.
Always the suckled one, her son,
the withered vine, the alcohol, the incubi,
all of which she swore to leave behind.
Or the constant terror of meaning
what to do or be.

But in the midst of all of this or after -
someone said, "New Orleans..."
And someone said, "Ghosts will breathe..."
in this last haven where guilt recedes,
and we are safe to be lost children
who walk a kind of wreckognition,
who bear a lasting need to live or die,
and most who still remember there is someone
they did not wish to leave behind.

And so it would become too real.
And soon she learned to swim upstream
through tides of bourboned bodies,
some of them half-innocents,
and some too ruined to be trusted.
And some with so much tenderness within
that she felt she might stop breathing.

And the night could never be so pretty -
and the cobblestones could never speak so clearly
and somewhere inside the rhythm of surrendering,
she came to know she was forgiven.

Hillary Hays
1997

[lizzytysh]

You write so true, so well of New Orleans, Hillary. No. 1? Are there others? Rich and image-dense phrasing. I hope you will share how long you've been writing and where. Granted, some of the mystery would be compromised, but reading you begs the questions. I love the squalor, the hope, and the resolution of this one.

The listed interests in your profile 'fit.' I look forward to more of your writing; I admire its depth, substance, and still-lyrical quality ~ as well as how you write with such clear intention.

~ Elizabeth