Standard Schaefer: Elegy for New Orleans (work in progress)

    I spent a lot of time in New Orleans as a kid, not as much as I would have liked, but some of the best days of my life occurred there.
    I went there for a few days with a guy named Andrew, whose last name I’ve long since forgotten. He was a musician and was recording funeral marches for a radio documentary. Going with him opened a few doors into the back rooms, if you will. And I don’t know what happened to the documentary, but the point was to capture a lot of homegrown music that had never been recorded or put in notation.
    It was with that in mind that I added “The Gap in the Tape” and kept that in mind as I was writing. I don’t know if that helps with the poem or not, but you might mention it in case it does.
    — Standard Schaefer

ELEGY FOR NEW ORLEANS
OR THE GAPS IN THE TAPE
Sept 6, 2005

After the mud-chokes and the cat-of-nine, after the
cat-marrying-the-gunner’s daughter
Keel-hauling, mastheading, ducking, and spread-eagle
the thanatocratic code
There is work for the bailiff.

It the city that is always pouring
Another cup of Kills Grief

Aqua fortis in the veins

Where senselessness redeems cheerlessness.

But cataclysmal as escape is a maligned science.
Sal si puedes, but it was black, though not absolutely
And absolutely there is smoke where there was hair.

Gives the heart where the hole blows

Bones stuffed with wet meat.

Vessels pressed to the scalp.

And through a hollow shaft infused with mint,
A Horse’s Ass Hallelujah to absolve the sin, daintily
Offered as an alibi for the lack of local knowledge
On the part of showman who couldn’t count his yearlings.

*

A whole city attached to a pasteboard rudder
with insomnia for a best friend

It had always refused to park within the lines

Its eyes ancillary to memory, and doing exactly as it
pleases,
traded wheaten loaf for dungeon floor

And tilted back a bottle of furious wind

But obstinate as the t-shirt she lifts to her lips
Ten, thirteen, ninety-six
Nubs of flux and obscene glue
mock the dialectique of wishes boiled from a wrathful
schmaltz

While cashiers with their contours danced clear the
rinse
Of hollow gray hellos and little steps back
Little shuffles forward, and worms on the lawn

Forced north, forms.

But always in the rue, always in the vicinity
bones and vows leave off

*

Past the walnuts and the blue cheese, through
magnolias and the apple
martinis
I saluted the badger from the peep show, and then made
way to the wild
mushrooms

Innocence requires cultivation, experience
circumference especially patience
Reform requires patriotism so very little is required
Amid the ultimate circumstances written persistence

Cosmopolitanism is only the idea of home, though as a
depot

Especially for red snapper leaping through the roof
Or an olive in a marlin between the decoys and
doubloons.

But with another pound of hemp, the whale bone is
mine.

And you, sir, have the grace of God. That should be
enough.

*

But memory is the rifle of no more memories. It is
ineligible for the
grant. It is opposed to night and money. Insects,
though prevalent, are
unmentionables.

She was always pregnant. It was a cash flow problem.
She breed mosquitoes
but strictly for export, usually to Texas where they
tumbled down the mesa
and into the mirror before waltzing into the
dandelions growing behind the
chain link.

The point, Mr. Commissioner, is that death budgets
nothing new
Only the aura presupposes signals that actually
signal.
And while it is true that leaves complicated the
trees,
That there’s a surfeit of lactation consultants.
There’s nothing to breathe.

*

so much absence
emits hesitation
same window
new panes
crossed out in light
vector after vector
adapting
to the denseness
interregnums
branch off
and step backwards
the invisible fades
into a precarious waste
henceforward the façade
approaches the nothing
already in the eyes

*

It was a threshold of a city, stopped short
And the howls leaked tendon
Through the forgotten chasms
Of equality and debt
Petroleum where the eye was
And just now opens.

*

which name your apart drifting
echoes straining the tape gesundheit
syllables no trombone would announce
down the pronouns’ scatter held separate
where the light is caught in handfuls
syllables only saying your slow
punctuation decomposes
imponderable substances
irreducible to the rigid limits of effect
or the set limits of abuse and noise
archaic arrangements swollen with pheromones
where tubas and pick-ups ape the bait
but armaments are not instruments of civilization
rust is not reform

*

density suffers from tightness
one without compartments
one without comportment
addresses the designation

simple doors over simple doors
amplify the argument
“and” or “or” the position of the lamp

in the middle of the music, an airport
decimated echoes of it’s black
and that’s fitting, though not absolute
but legendary

ledges in the elegy
pigeons on a wet bench
their shadows, clouds

a ferocious modesty
hides in the sparks and caramelized light

*

It was in a time when the page was a genre of hunger
egregious as speaking as if through a cone

The eagles were never egalitarians.

Yes folded no and amputated the opposition

Facts undertook rhetoric and risked clarity

Ouch was hierarchical so cuffed

Subterranean at the start, the flora of aberration.

A tap of the foot, the dust rises and resettles
Like lynchings and electrocution

A tap of the foot and the dust resettles
Three feet beyond the other side of the wall

The bench still wet is just around the corner
Where I am sitting naked and straining to hear
The strained sounds of the moons out of breath
Verses or hairs drain the vowel’s round sounds.

Just under the door, the damp shadow
Aspires to almost theological insight.

This passes for adequate.

This passes for verse.

It is written in hairs.

It is written for what left of the horses.

*

Sun at the door, but I’ve given up on endings
Especially coming full turn

Something gestures simplicity
And closes

Something else runs its course

*

Never the first was what
The names knew it
Never mattered what
Only the fact read want
Preparation involved failure
Obliteration is a fabrication
But too much was far
Though far returned was
Too much returns far
Too much returns and leaves why
Why even to so few
The terse expectations
Married hope to had
And in their merry survey
Cruel against the crystal face
Reflections in the sopping clock

*

The idea of a stone
Took two other names
One in place of the dead
One diminished additional

Rivulets around the archipelago
In a meditative stance

Fluctuations in what won’t sink

A mild degree of unpredictability
Preempts

Real and steadfast loss

Especially the enclosures

*





*

Again around comes which time

The pulse in the wisteria
The music adrift
In the harsh nettles
Bare blown, stopped out
The baritone your hand let fall

Now time and ruin
The edged out depth traverses
What will disappear of the scent

What is learned only by listening.

What again comes around which time

When there is only this time

*

(disjunction of nothing)
(suspended evocations)
proper to the genre
of hypothesis and guess
especially authorization
and against the rituals
of autonomy, light or dark
for a long time no one
could go near any of it
it came to us
in sepia music, muddled tones
the only language
anyone musters
all this gravel
in our mouths

*