The first time Sam
(her chosen name)
went down to the river
I stayed on the steps
tipped a musician
for St. James Infirmary
while her husband Dave
scattered Rebecca
(her given name)
into the Mississippi.
New Orleans
is a factory
of reinvention.
Come as you are.
Be who you wish.
Leave by the river.
I only called her
by her pen name–
rather her personna–
in the boisterous
bohemia of bars
and books and art
and poetry. We drank
ourselves silly and
carved our names
in bars like lovers.
We were as close
entwined but
mostly innocent;
moments on a stool
en-wrap-tured in
kisses. No more.
On Mardi Gras
we dance our
dead to the river.
I tried to follow
the others down
the riprap with
my walking stick;
stumbled a stigmata
deep in my knee
in her memory.
I hobbled
my bloody knee
like a peg-leg
to Pirate’s Alley
for a drink
the place I agreed
to the affair she
suggested but we
never consummated.
We settled for
a teenage lust
of mouths and
hands but no-
thing more.
Loyal to a fault
to friends and
husband; too
passionate
to be completely
contained.
We had what
a friend calls
the mindfuck,
an ethereal
connection–
as if lovers in
another life–
minds as close
as other lovers’
bodies come.
I will tattoo
For Sam
above this
scar I’ll wear
until it’s bits
enter the river.
A Factory of Reinvention
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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