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- Baldessari May 18, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rewind May 11, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Going in the Opposite Direction May 8, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rope Man with Cigarette April 25, 2012 Derek Bridges
A Dream Deferred
I don’t remember whose grandmother it was I went with Graydon to help fix a leaky tap. It might have been his or Wanda’s but that’s not important. That she was the last white woman living in her Ninth Ward neighborhood somewhere far up St. Claude in the late 1970s is what I remember.
They urged her to move out of the ramshackle single not because of that but because the place was falling apart. The Ninth Ward was where working class New Orleans lived, often in houses built and always maintained by the man of the house, and a widow didn’t have someone around to keep the place up properly. Her neighbors had fled but she was having none of that. This was the house she and her husband had spent their whole lives, raised a family. She wasn’t moving.
In the early 1960s the first attempts were made to desegregate New Orleans schools in the Ninth Ward. I don’t know why they chose McDonogh 19 in the Lower Nine and William Frantz on… Continue reading
Sea of Tranquility
You lie in the tub reading the new book of poems and think: there is no ink black enough for this man's words. This is not the tonic you require but you read on with the compulsive satisfaction of a cigarette, trading time for the the pleasurable release of smoke. You glance at the medicine cabinet and try to remember when the half becomes the whole, the moon white promised antidote to enveloping darkness. You lay the bleak but beautiful book aside and sink into the amniotic warmth, listen to the random minor notes of the solar lantern wind chime, a perhaps unwise impulse purchase of a man on the cusp of unemployment but the tones are soothing, the intermittence dissolving time in a minor key.
Continue readingTeenage Jesus
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As the youngest he is given the night watch. The sheep huddle together in the cool Judah night and leave him free to study the dark clockwork of the stars. Then wolves howl in the distance, and he is forced to walk guard, wondering what he would do with this simple staff of wood against determined yellow fangs, greedy for sheep. A gentle youth who would catch a scorpion in a palm leaf and turn it loose outside rather than crush it with a stone, he wonders if he has the strength to confront an angry pack howling for blood, if he is really meant to be a shepherd. As he walks guard the stars turn relentless in the heavens, unconcerned with his doubts.
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