For Lucy Blu
 
The soft rain, the bare tics from clouds
too heavy to contain themselves anymore.
Sometimes in New Orleans it is hard to tell
the difference between a cry of joy, a cleansing cry
and someone who just came here to give up
coughing out tears quietly by an alleyway or in a bar.
Laughter is close behind the pain here. Or ahead of it.
 
Anyway, rain is ticking onto statues of generals,
statues of musicians, onto pigeons whose orange
claws brighten. Silver chains of rain slink
into the sewer or pool in low spots in asphalt.
Trickles dive off roof tops down long links
of copper gutters, spills out on the sidewalk
 
as lovers pass. Rain sidles down
where the many colored pigeons 
bathe in a shimmer of puddle. 
As pairs head back to hotel rooms 
of urgency and joy, an older couple 
sits under an awning. Their love 
exactly as it is here, intact 
as they sip, pass a warm cup slowly,
back and forth, hand often touching hand.
                        

What is an arpeggio
	that it sails 
		so quickly –
			ear to heart,
resonates,
	heightens the instant,
		for as long 
			as it lasts?

Back held erect,
	with calm 
		authority you 
			nurtured the keys.

There wasn’t a song 
	you couldn’t 
		take apart 
			put back together

transformed simply
	the way light bends 
		a straight rod 
			underwater.

			In your hands
	in the movement of your hands
in the movement of your hands over keys

came arpeggios
	the soul did not know 
		it knew.

It is two in the afternoon. Two, on this rag-tag 
stretch of beach in Cajun paradise, Grand Isle.
 
Just beyond the shelf where surf churns up, brown 
pelican pump and glide inches above bronze sea caps.
 
We are four. Languishing. Dangled across soccer chairs. Swizzled.
We sip, gab, gossip, reminisce in the total glut of Saturday.
 
The full blare of a March sun bakes bones. I squint.
Nudge feet into sand. Skin drinks strong wind on this
 
sand-strip, barrier island. This extreme border of America 
during extreme times but under the least extreme of conditions.
 
The only other people on this beach are a couple old enough to have
picked up crows feet. Old enough that they should have children 
 
darting in and out of waves, burying themselves up to the neck
in sand. Instead they are here alone, drunk-ass-drunk by two.
 
Their hips swirl as surf crashes behind but they are oblivious, 
gloriously immured, melded, eyes locked onto one another. 
 
An hour ago they left chairs, a shade cover. He has a boom box 
hoisted up on his shoulder. His arm, muscled by years of labor, 
 
effortlessly lifts to curl up around the radio whose blast is 
so thankfully blanketed by gulf winds that we can not make out 
 
whether the strains of song are country thrum or the cheap fire 
of rock and roll, though they are only sixty feet away. 
 
Feet churn, hips roll, loll, dip. Slow and mesmerizing swell 
of two bodies immersed together into a sweet, drunken stir
 
of a Saturday’s roux upon the deeply brown sands, in the close 
heat of a March sun, unblocked. Cooked until they can not 
 
tell where surf or sun stop and where their selves begin.  
It is Saturday, effortless Saturday. It is two, only two.