Le Meschacèbè (Palmer in the Pocket)
For Jo Beth Britton
The river pours out of the Peabody Hotel through a lobby fountain full of ducks cotton floats on barges through the air sky sweeps down to the sea cloud wind bellows across the oxbow lakes abandoned by the river where it turned away in its elegant course le Meschacébé & the Corps of Engineers can’t do nothin’ about it when the river changes course again when the flood waters rise whole villages move when the flood waters rise above the natural levee delta sea-foam spreads humus across the valley rich oleaginous loam fish swept between trees slipt through houses in outer space and hid in the clouds of stars rivertopped houses soaked in nutrients at roots pike crushed to fish meal beneath their feet pushed south from lakes up north downriver by floodwaters cold to a Delta visible from Mars & when the waters receded the first mounds appeared Eros is possibility & the most erotic unleashes the most possibility Le Meschacébé flicks its tongue into the moon mother out of which flows tap water ice car washes the senseless articulated by a migrant thrush jays squawking in the fields below the crescent gulls swirl across the grass, sweep and return sweep and return searching for seeds & all the water in the world rushes down, the people crushed atop their houses one hundred miles above the river’s mouth or 300, where Monroe now stands & Sonny Boy broadcast blues live over mythic radio in the valley known as the Delta Ouragan stroke when the Corps blew the levee the world disappeared and Houston Stackhouse levied the blues “The first time I heard Muddy’s “Flood,” wrote Robert Palmer “I remembered an afternoon, years before, when I felt an overcast sky dropping lower and lower, increasing a peculiarly disturbing pressure I could feel physically in my blood. I was sure the heavens were going to pour down rain and lightning bolts at any moment. But the storm never came— it was inside me, a perception of a gathering emotional storm that I’d unconsciously projected into the cloudy skies.” I didn’t know it was history I just thought it was great music poetry pushed through a guitar’s neck blasted out of a sound hole a taste of the best basting a drum ever took roasted pearls of twilight scratched into the sky
Night Notes, an Email
to Kathleen Kraus
Patricia's birthday is tomorrow &
I guess we're going to have to find a way
to celebrate after all. I mean,
for better or worse, the day of her birth
brought some joy into my life.
We got it bad.
We're in Memphis. Our neighborhood
is probably under water. Our house
might not be standing. Patricia's school
might be the one we heard
had been destroyed. We'd just gone
into her studio to make sure
a particular photograph was
off the floor. Our lives have been changed,
"changed utterly," as Yeats put it
"a terrible beauty is born"
The city is 80% under water.
Our town, across a very large lake,
is also under water.
We had just bought the house in April.
It is also possibly
under water. It might have been reduced
to a foundation slab. We don't know
and won't for a few days
We think we'll probably stay near the Delta
until martial law is lifted in Slidell.
Our house is in one of the worst hit
neighborhoods. But I was thinking about the little house
on Jourdan
and my dear friend Kathleen...
we're using wifi at a coffeeshop here.
Red Roof Inn rocks.
They let us bring in our dogs & parakeets!
Oh, you know the score,
our whole town
was built on what used to be wetland,
used to be lagoon, used to be water.
now water wants it all back.
The storm they said could happen has happened,
and please let there NOT be another one next week.
No matter what happens to the physical city,
the spirit that created the second line will never die.
We'll be ok even if our house is totaled.
I wasn't ready to let go yet. We'd only been there four months—
with no New Orleans across the lake,
there is little in St. Tam, even for Patricia,
who has spent most of her life there—
As refugees we're not doing too badly,
You are a joy. Don't forget that.
Don't lose touch.
8-30-2005
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
rootes in solide erthe
feet bare padding soil
last week, I paid
last insult to hip and thigh
now an early spring and narcissus
all coming up: late planted arugula
spinach lettuce and Chinese cabbage
& I hope we get a good crop before
the summer heat arrives
and it all dies
the blueberry out of its tub has rootes in solide erthe
leafing a bit and the new citrus too
I’m trying to remember what I told them all this morning
& what was that song I sang
“so come all ye rolling minstrels
and together we will try
to rouse the spirit of the earth
and move the rolling sky”
(“Come All Ye,” by Sandy Denny & Fairport Convention)
The BeZine 
What a unique voice you have! I especially liked the last stanza of “Le Meschacèbè”. You have a good way of placing the reader in the midst of your descriptions. Thank you for sharing these with us. 🙂
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Dragonketet: Thank you. “Le Meschacebe” came through long collaboration with the poet John Sinclair, who moved to New Orleans from Detroit in the early 90s & was working in a similar vein, using the words of blues musicians to tell the story of their music. He’d been mining a book by his friend Robert Palmer, a musicologist, called Deep Blues, a history of the blues from the Mississippi Delta to Detroit & Chicago. I was also editing a magazine called Mesechabe: the Journal of Surregionalism, focused on the ecology and culture of south Louisiana, the Mississippi and the delta region. So it kind of fell into place. Robert was living in New Orleans too, but succumbed to a long illness. The poem is dedicated to his widow, Jo Beth Britton. Thanks for your comment!
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