| Candle flames warp and lap in green glass
holders as radio drummers outdo another lapse in human energy
somewhere in the United States.
Can't hear where they are, not in New Orleans after
those floods as their drumming, many drummings, their many
drummings undulating loops and blues rolling on top of waves
like a person walking.
A person walking down the sidewalk of liberated stores after
voting is complete, after cheating has been rooted out, imagine
it.
A person after fundamentalists have returned to their camps
guarded by meanness and appropriating scriptures scrawled
on flags.
So the song, "Shoo fly, don't bother me," cooks up and so
many are dancing to it. Will this year's elections be different?
Will the neo-con vote-cheating power-throned repent? Don't
they know it's wrong? Period. Don't they repair to the judge's
chambers where rule is by law? If they cheat and cheat and
lie and slander and lie and steal and abandon those in need,
what else are they prepared to do?
This sentence was going to say something about neighbors
in all neighborhoods being human beings, brothers and sisters,
citizens of the sun of democracy, everyone equal.
Yet here come some more Republican pure rocky crags, pitch-white
vanishing lies, midnight bill signings fogging the hills,
crackling open their serpent-egg radio in the vacuum mouth
of the host.
You can read the Bible and honor the host. And you can see
those fogs are older than we are, Neolithic now, roiling and
descending, saturating the wealthy high-white colonial Mississippi
home.
Wait—the drumming we're hearing is from New Orleans
Mardi Gras Indians, some of whom wear uniforms that cost thousands
of dollars, Marsalis now explaining the sound that isn't
European, that brings you down, he says, or finds you where
you're down, which is a good thing.
The Hot Eight Brass Band starts in, trumpets splicing nearby
notes into dissonant screeching underpowered by tubas and
now a tenor sax solo and voices chanting a work rhythm.
Drumming underswells and drive-planting African and West
coasts off the solo trumpet golden light over rumbling.
Sitting here by the birds who are now listening as the music
fits together but doesn't—we hear it in their
language but not. Two voices grunt and call out now horns
in a blizzard back to a chord. They're leading a procession
through post-flooded streets, some neighbors near, some outweighed
by oceanic outwash, some just back in lost mud.
But it's too fast for a funeral, more like a send-off. A
bone slides high up in its range and back in chests of those
breathing. Trumpets are lighting atoms in brainwork. And the
birds here still quiet, as if construction work were piped
into this sanctuary, this room of a century.
The chanting works unstopped by how far New Orleans is from
anyone now, ending in a mushroom chord, a man shouting, "Katrina
Survivors," and clapping to a Cream song, drumming,
the tuba wandering.
Now it's a blues song again—no, a communion of
gravity and solar-powered metals, the notes out-breathed,
the musicians kissing it out, out, the fog outside, where
it's doing its evening good. |
