You, Me & the Bayou Moon
The street was aglow with string lights, blazing night, eyes of the moon flashing behind veils of mist and moss in the jazz saturated air.
“I’ll write you a poem that will make you believe in love again.” Said a man sitting in the middle of the street. He tipped his hat back and knocked his swollen knuckles against a handwritten sign reading – POEMS ON THE SPOT $10. He had spent the day trying to sell to people who just walked on past. I had spent the day walking past stranded and transient artists trying to sell me just about everything. Even if I’d wanted an augured poem to enchant my heart, I did not have any cash left.
“I do not think you have the power to do that.” I sassed unfiltered.
I kept walking, the jazz was beckoning. Mighty rhythm, the sound of life surging from musicians’ lungs and fingertips. The popping notes bouncing on the street. Buildings on either side decaying monuments summoned out of the bayou in placid exultation. Their walls thick with history, sticky with paint though decades old, still has never dried.
La Nouvelle-Orleans, the damage is the city.
What a thought…
Silk blouse clinging in the humidity, the thought stops me midstride. Four days of brewing and stewing in the rich dense air of fishy gales, oak, black mold and jasmine, something needed to come out. To take shape like the petty rages swelling up from the gulf.
Belly full of beignet, that gumbo, those oysters, jambalaya, frog legs, creole crawfish omelet and oh that crab cheesecake! Days of eating and walking, at night I craaaaaaaved that jazz.
But my heart tugged; my curiosity pulled me to him. I turned around and approached the self-proclaimed doctor of love. He was very young or much older, it was so hard to tell with his tangle of frizzy hair spilling out of a top hat. He was dressed like a 19th century vagabond, patchwork vest and trousers, gloves with missing fingers, no shoes. His name was Claude and he slept on the streets.
“$10 for a poem.” Said he, just in case I could not read the sign. He tapped his knuckles against it again.
“How about this,” I quipped, “I’ll trade a poem for a poem.”
It took him a moment to realize what I was offering. His eyes narrowed. He may have considered that I was bamboozling him, a loss of income or potentially both.
I defined the terms of my offer. “You choose the topic, a reasonable length, and you will not be disappointed. I’ll even let you read it first before we trade. If you don’t like it, keep both poems with the satisfaction that I might go mad not knowing what yours says, but such consequences are worth the risk. Are they not?”
He tore a sheet of paper out of a notebook with a flourish and handed it to me. “We have a deal.”
“What topic for your poem miss?”
I smiled. “Go ahead, make me believe in love again.”
Claude returned the smile.
“And your poem?” I asked.
“Dreams.” He replied licking the tip of his pen like some old-world calligrapher and for a moment I wondered if I was conversing with a ghost. I looked around me and no one else seemed to pay us any mind. Perhaps he was not there at all.
Love/Dreams
The way he said them, the words were his. Almost as though I had been waiting all my life to hear them interchangeably said by a poet named Claude on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. Those two words lived in the same untouchable realm: devastatingly powerful, fragile, nascent and yet complete.
And so, beneath the magic of the bayou moon I wrote a poem that was just for him, and he wrote a poem that was just for me. We scribbled away with the crowd flowing around us like swampy duckweed breaking around the bow of a boat only to swallow the wake.
Content, I handed Claude the paper. His lips moved silently reading each word of the poem with an almost ceremonial solemnity. And then, there it was a slight smile and glint in the eye. All his incertitude vanished.
He handed me his paper in return. “You might have told me you were a poet as well, and a dreamer at that!”
“I sir, am an amateur.”
He laughed.
I curtseyed and thanked him for the poem.
“You’re welcome.” He bowed with a wink watching me turn to go. “Are you not going to read it now?”
“Not just yet...”
He tipped his hat knowingly.
The jazz summoned.
