Well Bottom Blues

I can’t think of anywhere I could try to publish this so I’m putting it up here.

After the “Beautiful Times” and “The Capital”
sections of Czeslas Milosz's “A Treatise on Poetry”

“I remember everything.”
—”Natura”, Milosz

The calas woman calling over the muddy road,
mounted by her tignon like the loa of womanhood. 
German bakers shape the baguettes, smell of baking
mingled with the persistent smell of rot rising up from 
the swamp beyond the ramparts. Here iron rusts 
in a month and the bricks are soft, barely containing
their colonial ambitions. Without the cypress timbers
the city would all collapse, the Parisian dreams
of rich Spanish conquest. There is no silver but
the sun is molten gold, burning European skin
a soft octoroon brown, drenched in sweat.

Under cover of darkness and French, Creole poets
publish verses in the best European styles, blended
with this city and in proportion with the Codes.
A first pharmacist carefully measures his fractions
and incidentally creates the bitters-driven cocktail
while the ships still arrive from the Barbary Coast
with the survivors of their piratical cargoes.
Cotton is king, feeding the displaced-peasant looms 
of bloody England in exchange for colonial tea.
There is no escape from the original sin of those
initial intentions, to scrape every last crumb
from the Americas, bales weighted with suffering.
And still the Creole poets sing above the stench.

In time the Anglo wanderers come down the river
like snags, catching in the bank. Lafcadio Hearn,
Greek-Irish, emblem of the later Mediterranean
settlers and dislodged Irish who would at last
make this city persistent beneath its Spanish iron.
Although he clearly loved it, the city was not alien 
enough for his tastes and he moved on to Japan.
That discalced angel of foreign, northern America
Walt Whitman found rough manly love on the docks
but fled back to the clinging remnants of England
leaving only disintegrating newsprint behind.

Still the artists came, fleeing the ruling Puritans
in search of a cheap substitute for Europe.
William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, 
later Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, 
come to slum in the city of Grace King
and George Washington Cable, to take
the warm Gulf waters of The Awakening. 
Discrete men and their close companions
need not fear in this sympathetic City 
where favors are openly traded like trinkets
at an unmasked ball, assignations after.
Women deal openly in beauty and secrets, 
charms and cards, sachets of mystery.
The river keeps its secrets in the dark.

The godsons of cotton still rule from mansions
gawked at from the rattling tourist trolley.
The oilmen came to feast on shrimp and oysters
and on the marshes, which they turned
into open waters, linked by canals
with not a touch of Venice about them
until everyone in Rex and Comus were sated.
The flood washed away the inconvenient centuries,
a blank slate with certain undesirables sent East.
They built hotels like the ancients built temples
to draw down favor from the fungible gods.
Where boys once bottle cap tapped and women 
of dubious femininity played the strip club drunks
they swept the streets clean with lemon scent.
They abolished the cocktail in favor of tropical
daiquiris concocted for a failed World's Fair.
They plotted a new Epcot with one exhibit
set aside for sin, and conjured a city of ghosts,
lurid Madam Laurie by night and day drinking 
vampires mixing Bloody Marys in the shade.

Now the bohemians must catch a bus or bike
to the Vieux Carré. What's left of cheap rooms
grow decrepit, not dishabille but demolition
by neglect, or vanished into illegal but winked 
at erzatz hotels.  I cannot name one character
like Ruthie the Duck Lady or Gypsy Lou Webb.
The Krishna’s push ballcaps onto your head 
and demand money instead of pushing 
the Bhagivad Gita. The gutter punks are gone.
Once I could drop into a table at Cafe du Monde
an afternoon when my girlfriend worked there.
Now the tourists queue up in the sun as if
it were the newest attraction at Disney World.

The city fathers want respectabke operations 
and chase the guerrilla artists off the streets
as they close in on shuttering the titty bars.
The dived of lower Decatur are going the way
of the Greek sailor bars of last century.
If you want to pet a large yellow python go 
find the last Snake Farm in old run-down Florida.
Character is carefully regimented. The t-shirts
hang (against the rules) from compliantly green
shutters, one tourist trinket store after another.  
No one knows where they got their shoes. 

The old Quarter houses are shuttered not against
the heat but because the new owners are all
in New York and California talking about who
they saw at Jazz Fest, which restaurant the best.
They came, they saw, they sucked us dry as
the marshes drained to build half the city,
as did the oilmen and the northern cotton brokers
where the French and Spanish failed. They
channeled the river to build their America
and left us sinking into the history they took
to build their carefully packaged fantasy island.
The charm has gone out of New Orleans
as surely as the Church drove the druids and
the fairies out of the British country side. 
What could we do? There was nowhere in
their cash register America we wished to go.