It was a mechanically sound Corona station wagon,
boring as a night spent with a visiting aunt.
You could soft boil an egg in the time it took
to get this thing up to seventy, feel them struts shimmy.

Ran it into the dirt going up and down an interstate corridor
for one of those jobs where you watch the dead
come alive as they rush out the door every 4:30 p m 
toward cars parked in the punishing brilliance of a shell lot.
Building cleared by 4:33. Last out trips the alarm.

I used to take it down along River Road, 
boom out, swerve back like I was following 
the lazy loop of a saxophone’s neck.  
Discovered a church in Bayou Goula not much bigger 
than a walk in closet. You let yourself in with a key 
kept in a small cypress box off to the side.
Inside, to the left, was a stand of candles whose flames willow
when the door opens or closes. They left a butane lighter
and a long stick you snuff in sand after giving an offering.
That way your prayer stays behind to cast jasmine light
onto a Saint Christopher, a Francis of Assisi, four distinct Mary’s,
one with a serpent crushed beneath her left foot. That is the way
Louisiana is – licked by rivers, flush with faith.
A place where you hear songs well up even in its silences.

I finally dealt that monkey-shit brown Corona 
to a little guy from Gonzales on a Sunday 
when nothing was open to do the paper work.
He promised to register the sale straight away, but evidently
never got around to that because a year later I got a call
from a detective down in New Orleans who wanted to know 
if I still owned a brown Toyota station wagon. Because,
 in point of fact, it was a subject of criminal inquiry.

I laughed out loud when he said my own special beater
had been used in a snatch-n-go robbery of some poor bastard’s
news stand at the corner of Hopeless and Gentilly.
I couldn’t imagine the getaway scene as anything other than
a slapstick Western where harebrained cowpokes hold up a noon coach.
Then try to make their getaway furiously switching the flanks of burros.
I envisioned a trio of sad sacks back at their apartment counting the haul.
Carefully calculating how many more heists it was going to take 
before they got enough together for a vehicle worth half-a-damn.
                        

For a long time now
it seems

we have not
been drunk enough.

When wind comes
with its charge

and current
we can respond

in the quick
where movement begins

in the spark
of the quick.

During the dance
don't the feet

themselves know
where to fall

if we let them
if you let them?