Daniel Nathan Terry

New Orleans, Lafeyette Cemetery, 2006 wood-cut print by Benjamin Billingsley 

Days of Dark Miracles*

New Orleans 2005

In these days of dark miracles the Mississippi flows

backward.

In Lakeview, a tree is leafless, but full of howling

dogs.  An attic is crowded with lamps that need

rewiring, unfashionable dresses, books no one will ever

reread, yellowing photographs and a cowering widower

who can hear – below him – waves lapping at his

ceiling.  The stairwell becomes a maelstrom as Lake

Pontchartrain rearranges the living room furniture.

In the Lower Ninth, wind-wracked and doorless,

windowless and blind – after giving up on decades

of keeping its place and growing weary of resting

on a weak foundation – a house

walks.

In Elysian Fields the streets become poisonous

black canals and corpses drift like gondolas.  Here,

in the New Venice, the living die, but the dead

will not be still.

When the wind dies down, New Orleans is a city of roof

dwellers. Each house left standing eave-deep in dark water

is a barren, scarred island.  Each survivor is a castaway

waiting to be rescued.

The following nights are cloudless and filled with stars.

No search beams pierce the darkness.  The only manmade

light comes from mouths of guns fired like flares and from broken

gas pipes below the drowned city as the water catches

fire.

                              * first appeared in The River

(Waveland, Mississippi)

Two swallowtails mating

after the storm –

wings washed brown

with rain, edges pinking-sheared

by hours and days of the impossible –

too weary to rise an inch above

Highway 90 as it smokes its heat

into the evening air, too damaged

to be what they are – they roil

like water snakes. 

                                  In love,

they find something to be

other than doomed.

                                                           * first appeared in The River

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, Wood-cut print, 2006 by Benjamin Billingsley

Before She Leaves the Delta Forever, Belva Claire Composes

Her Husband’s Epitaph and Decides on Two Lines*

I have gathered for your grave

every dollar that we made,

every prayer I ever prayed,

every nickel that we saved.

Every dollar that we made,

every favor now called in,

every nickel that we saved,

bought a box to lay you in.

Every favor, now called in,

every debt that I collected

bought a box to lay you in.

To your monument erected:

every debt that I collected –

and the wedding bands we bought,

to your monument, erected.

Into coffin handles wrought –

the wedding bands we bought.

Every prayer I ever prayed –

into coffin handles wrought –

I have gathered for your grave.

                          *first appeared in Oberon