You said your name
was Rita with a "d"
and let me blunder
my way through you.
You said I had charm
(and finesse was for amateurs)
I liked how you were a ladder,
how you could speak
in any accent you wanted;
you liked when I
did not change the sheets
or tie my hair back,
You had dropped
out of art school
in Alabama
where your father
still thought you were a virgin,
and I was bussing tables
on St. Charles.
We lived all that summer
in one room
and a kitchen.
You would fry plantains
and we would wash them down
with purple haze,
watching the musicians
silhouette their souls
against the sky.
On weekends
you would tell f
Did you wake up
one morning and decide
your name was Monday?
Did you lay out slip and stockings
and decide that pretty
was really underneath,
and that your face alone
would buy you nothing?
Did you think
of the men staring
on the bus
and in the elevators
as the car moved up the girders
so high your skirt
was a balloon?
And did the brush of
his sleeve
against your breast
as the crowd moved forward
stop your boots
from crossing the street
and send you into traffic
wanting to feel his name?
I remember
we sat on the beach at sunset
and counted the kites,
spent sails torn from galleons
breaking clouds into spindrift,
and watched the seagulls
carving August
out of blue and white.
You wore the sky
around your neck,
where the day's warmth
knotted in a chain,
and held shells to my ear
like a mermaid stolen from the sea
breaking the surface of shimmer
and tangled fish
over salty oyster beds.
I remember
the color of your hair
lashing against your shirt
and your pirate smile
like a crooked bird
warming the dusk
and the long cool of your legs
wrapping my nights
and stealing the summer...
A wrought iron balcony,
overgrown with jasmine
frames the summer evening,
pulls magic from doorways
and sends it spinning into the wanton dark
with a clatter of glass beads
and raw red saxophone.
Voodoo heat bleeds out low and blue,
bubbles under door sills
and over window ledges
to set the city humming.
The jazz blast of feet on cobblestones -
a parade of tourists,
washed in summer and silk
shake graveyard dust from their shoes
and disappear into the long, languid dark
among the palm readers and card tricksters
crouched in the curl of a summer dream.
The warm slit of night beckons me,
welcomes me with open arms
and