There is no future.
It’s that simple. New Orleans
humps its sodden past
through every razored
moment as we wander down
Canal Street towards
the winter river running
sick with mid-western flux and sweat.
And the rain that falls
is ever new and to no purpose
under heaven, each cold
drop a wanderer whose
slow birth and grand fall
never leave the eternal now.
The past is no more
real, though it presses
caput mortuum against
the mossy slickness
of our eyes, sweated
from every brick and sinter.
Oswald stood curbed
by his pique just there,
Marxist pamphlets and orphan
pain in either hand,
the cool of Texas
autumn already shambling
through the dimestore wool
of his suit. A few
gray blocks east Faulkner crouched
on a balcony
with a BB gun
in the malice of his youth
and shot at lonely tourists
musing in Jackson
Square. The lamentable past
is better lost, and
the city does as
it has always done, slouching
towards oblivion
to withdraw among
the swamps where the long shadows
grow. We ride the dark
ferry alone, cold
in our cups and infinite
in mathematical
joy, the great diesels
driving us like a blunt plow
across the currents
and quick compulsions,
as unaware of the black
river as it is
of orchids or us
or where it has been or where
it will ever be.
John Blair has published six books, most recently Playful Song Called Beautiful (University of Iowa Press, 2016) as well as poems and stories in The Colorado Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. His seventh book, The Aphelion Elegies, is forthcoming this spring from Main Street Rag Press.
