- In memory of Sheldon P. Zitner, a teacher and friend.
The Saxophone Player
The wind bears an iron fist, my back to the wall, holding on to the gravity of life. Black night opens its jaws to reveal a secret: water trickles into the vastness of sleep. An uninvited guest knocks at the door, determined to go deep into the interior of things. Fear, wind, and sea turn into language.
The waves of this year, the text of that summer flood the page. To drown is a kind of parting company. Life’s only a promise. Don’t grieve for it.
A tall black man with a short moustache and a gap between his teeth plays the saxophone. The tune fills the air with lovemaking breath; pays tribute to the suffering of a black maiden, waiting by the river. But she’s already drowned.
Standing on a street corner, a child’s walking to sunlight. Smooth and delicate, the tune awakens the black folks to clip their fingernails until songs from the old days are played again to a circulating city built by a string quartet: Armstrong, Bechet, Domino, Marcellus.
The city gate opens to welcome her people back. Black Women, stung by swarm bees, no, a storm, will love again in those beds where they made love, wept, cursed . . .
The city is a sunken ship. Can it be saved? It must be saved.
A Stop in New Orleans
Gasping at the September wind, the saxophone player turns away
from the dribble and drool of the French Quarter
into the narrow lobby of the Super Dome –
its sweltering heat full with morning odors,
soldiers of the 82nd Air-borne in rakish berets
stand in a block-long line with security contractors from Blackwater
(“It’s our first state-side op!”),
CNN boom-mike operators,
SWAT teams from Oregon,
the FDNY to get burgers and sausages
doled out by the staff of the USS Iwo Jima .
Whatever historical truth is made manifest in the destruction of the city
is quickly being combed over for the cameras.
The flashes of reality
that have been broadcast to the world
are already being transformed into media spectacle.
Smoke billows up from barbecue grills
placed directly in front of New Orleans’ World Trade Center.
That it happened to be September 11
lent the scene an air of exquisite surreality.
Two blocks away, the Morial Convention Center still smells
like an empty slave ship moored at a wharf.
The TV people are busy
reducing history to a series of bathetic tropes:
the flag waving in slow motion,
the rescued puppy,
the evacuee given the star treatment of American Idol.
The neighborhood is desolate,
except for stray dogs wandering
past in the flickering light of a deserted gas lamp
that, strangely, still works.
A body lies on a porch under a sheet a few blocks away,
and even after two weeks
was still lying there.
In the evening,
the mosquitoes come out,
there is no sound in the darkened neighborhood
but an occasional barking dog,
the thwack-thwack of Black Hawks
flying low over the city with thermal sensing devices
looking for looters or survivors.
The little group of reporters smoke cigarettes,
drink warm brown liquor,
talk long into the night about what exactly it means
to file dispatches from the apocalypse