| At
Home in the Twenty-first Century
The same azaleas
bloom along the ditch.
The live oak in
the front yard still
touches the ground
with its dark branches.
Crows fly in the
same sky chasing
the same hawks.
Carp still feed
on the green minnows
in the shallow pond
in the backyard.
The dust keeps
drifting in the air.
The same wind keeps
blowing through the pines.
In Lacombe,
Louisiana
Mother is at the window
calling me from a distance
of twenty years.
Her squirrel stew is still on the stove.
Carrots and purple onions drift
along the October wind.
My step-father burns
every stump in the yard
with every tire he can find.
His stomach still flat
his beard pure red.
He's waiting for the pipeline
to blow up the front yard.
One day it will.
My brother in the road --
he plays with a plastic toy --
a tow-headed boy with capped teeth.
He'll grow up vicious and fine;
many women will know him.
He'll die in some mine-shaft
leaving behind children
enough to carry his name.
I'm out there too, walking
a swamp-ridge and carrying
a single-shot twelve-gauge.
There's blood on my face: mosquitoes.
I'm out there shaking and sweating
with only half a father
and half a brother
and no mother to speak of.
I stop and listen to her voice
drifting from a long way off.
- Louis Bourgeois
| Louis was born in
New Orleans. He is the poetry editor of Yalobusha
Review. He has published work in Poetic Hours, Parnassus,
The Oxford American and Tundra. |
|
