Reclaimed Land

Down at the end of Carrollton the city swims back into the Mississippi,
the mosaic one-ways, patched black with asphalt and grey with cement,
sleep when the civil engineers sleep, the men, reclining slowly, sinking back
into bed as the streets sink back into the marsh, as the potholes brim
with shadows which pour forth from oak trees like spanish moss. The levee,
right outside earshot of the sizzle and pop of Camelia’s 24-hour deep frier,
keeps the river’s slick, chocolate-licked, five-year-old fingers from plucking
the paint chips off the walls of the shotgun houses, but it can’t keep
water from whispering through the aquifer underneath, telling stories
in the grasping-dark crawl-space between the foundation and the floor about
life with the splashing cypress trees, and about how the curling ceiling
joists and wall struts should pine to be swept out to sea instead
of resigned to sag lower and lower under the weight of moisture and mold.

The river gets in regardless, through the ground, the steaming grass, the heavy-gasping air.
So me and Ev, Trey and Sav always thought the levee better as a lawn chair, better
to watch cars bounce along the buckling roads, going five in the thirty-five, better
to play guitar where the warm, wet winds make every chord diminished, better
to sing American Pie in slow, pitchy dirges, trying to find some exotic key amongst
the cacophony of de-tuned strings, of the E flat to B, D flat to G, A, and E. Once,
we brought up some Bulleit rye because we thought it’d be funny to drink
on a levee that never ran dry, but its quick, sharp shot scraped our tongues raw
like no cayenne pepper ever could. We poured the whiskey out over the levee,
watched it sprint down to the quilted street where it pooled in a pothole
and began to seep quietly back into the earth.