SHOWCASE SUNDAY

I Remember the City

Not for fried eggs
and andouille sausage at Mother’s

not for the palmist at Jackson Square
who declared our life lines identical

not for our sore feet or the humidity
or the slow stride of the Mississippi.

I remember the city for The Famous Door
at the corner of Bourbon and Conti:

You were wearing a green dress
and you were dancing

with a boy you’d just met,
smiling the way a girl smiles

before she believes in hurricanes
or experiences rising water,

before she knows how completely
everything changes once levees are breached,

how a decade of friendship is not the first
thing lost, but the one

that swells after the waters recede –
the door that sticks,

the mold that makes a garden of the ceiling
and the boy not quite a memory.

- Irene Latham

Ever lost a friend to something that seemed to come out of nowhere? Sigh. It happens.

"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes