memories of Great Babylon

[bronze_ribbons]

I fried okra earlier this evening, for tomorrow's supper, and thought back to good times in and around Faubourg Marigny, where I stayed during various visits to NOLA over the past five years.

One morning there, I even finished a poem:

Catch


Last night, my cat turned into a bouquet of fish.
She smells like an ice cream cone melting in the sea,
a marbling of cream and salt and lazy springiness.


This morning, I nearly took off someone's head.
It wasn't the cat's. His unscrews neatly
and always lands right side up, like his feet.


Tonight, I'm watching the cats swoop around,
transparent as the lilt of a tiny bell,
cool and silver and rich as a forest of fish.

- pld

Floria at the Court of Two Sisters, coating a sazerac glass with herbsaint with just a few practiced flicks of her wrist. The voodoo museum that mostly reminded Saz and me of our fixer-uppers. Watching beignet-making at the Cafe du Monde through a big plate window. Visiting a jazz exhibit and feeling oddly sorry for the instruments (stuck in their cases instead of being played...). Strolling around Frances Parkinson Keyes's house. The obelisk at the cemetery with a court case number instead of a name. Countless bottles of wine, whisky, and Abitas accompanying conversations and backrubs in Saz and Erac's kitchen.

I've written other poems about the place -- we usually made our way down there on the back of the BYM's motorcycle, and there was plenty of time to contemplate possibilities. (I also once shoved a fistful of Drayton sonnets into my jacket pocket and snuck looks at them during gas stops.) A rather notorious friend of a friend reportedly called it the one city too decadent even for him. I was there once on Mardi Gras; more often, a weekend or two before. I disposed of most of the beads and plastic cups and tokens during various cleaning binges, but the first throw I ever managed to catch (a heavier necklace of white and green-gold-purple) is still hanging inside my closet.

I keep thinking about the Library of Alexandria -- about things that vanish, that become retrievable only through memories and through memorabilia preserved elsewhere. There are plenty of other places in my memory that are no longer what they were, or no longer exist -- shops and restaurants, dorms and hotels -- but it does feel different, when something disappears because it was undercapitalized or outlived its time or its owners moved on vs. something devoured and redefined so swiftly and so markedly, for which this mourning of mine (I speak for no one else) strikes me as both too little and too much at the same time.

Comments

[katharine-b.livejournal.com]

I stayed in the Fauborg Marigny in March, and absolutely loved it -- I've been thinking about it this week, too. I have the beads I caught in the Marigny's St. Patrick Day parade twisted around the doorknob to my room. (We won't talk about the beads that smacked me in the face when I wasn't paying attention... heh.)

I'm glad your friends are safe.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That last paragraph strikes me as such a Mechaieh thing to write; no one else would say that in that way but there was (for me at least) an immediate ring of truth.

There's no question the city will be rebuilt, because of the importance of its port. It was originally build by refugees, rebuilt after fire, has survived drastic changes of culture. But all of those were in less homogenoeous times. I tend to think and hope that the spirit of New Orleans is such that it will retain its character and resist the bland-enizing trend of this time. I hope I'm right.

[catrinella.livejournal.com]

The Library of Alexandria, yes. That, and the Villa of the Papyri, have been echoing in my head.

NOLA

[(Anonymous)]

Hey you after all these yrs..! Caroline / Caffeinbean / Conspicuous here... were reading a bunch of NOLA livejournals when I came to think of yours. Love the flicking of the wrist & the sazerac-glass :)
http://autostrada.blogspot.com

Re: NOLA

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Oh! you! I've missed you!