Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A REPLY TO STORMS IN NEW ORLEANS; FOR MY MOTHER IN SEATTLE, by CAROLYNE WRIGHT


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A REPLY TO STORMS IN NEW ORLEANS; FOR MY MOTHER IN SEATTLE, by                    
First Line: Nothing unholy about lightning where
Subject(s): New Orleans; Storms


Nothing unholy about lightning where
I come from. No nightly pyrotechnics,
no Voudoun-Thor hurling his thunderbolts
upside the sky, great swags of rain-laurel
slapping the jalousies. Never the dull
pressing-down of cloud-cover, breezeways
in heat-stunned swelter, saltwater
glaze on the skin. Not the river
twelve feet above the city, the levee
that cradles the current in its arms
rolling slow as thunder. No monsoon's
straight-down drench, Creole sweetness
and crepuscule making an evening of afternoon.

Where I grew up, I never had to shun
standing under slash pines, never run
through the shotgun row of rooms
unplugging lamps and window fans.
I never had to lie down with a man
as far as bodies can from door frames
and let the tempest steal words from
our mouths. No silence before the storm
or drips from eaves like afterthoughts.

Where I'm from, storms poured out
their cumulus contents and moved on,
silver as parachute-silk linings.
For them, no barometric records
Made to be broken, no sopped sponges
in the corners, no oleander shrubs
huddled on the neutral ground along Elysian
Fields, beaten flat by baseball hail.
I never skidded into wrong turns
down one-way canals of street-flood,
or flipped over in some impassable
cul-de-sac between Piety and Desire,
wheels spinning against grillework.

Only once, the postwar powerlines fallen,
My father across the Cascade rain front
in Spokane, thunder over Alki Point
gunning its engines on the roof,
my mother stuck candles in a loaf
of bread, the kitchen beyond the tapers
dim as a Rembrandt interior. My mother
younger than she'd ever be again.
It's the birthday party of the rain,
she said, to quiet my baby brother's whimper.


Copyright © Carolyne Wright.
First appeared in The New England Review, Volume 21, Number 4, Fall
2000.
http://www,middlebury.edu/~nereview






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