errol miller
Last Night at Billy Bob's
The crowd from Chicago was there
pushing and shoving, drinking Bud Light
and aromatic misty concoctions
from alligator blood and cypress-sap
all the comings, all the goings, all the alluvial
stories begin written, this keepsake night
nothing could keep me in, fluttering
in the portico of the temple by the River
peace never came to the Ouachita Valley, faster
now than ever the New Age was upon us
walking with us in the marketplace of change
there, in that velvet verbiage of twilight
I think I saw a hand extending down from heaven
I saw the white ceramic busts of the Saints arranged
in a semi-circle just outside the wooden window
I saw crazy moons on fire
blue nuns on their way to Mass
and a waitress carrying bread and fish
to a dying man on a flaking houseboat, a man
from the other side bragging about his life
his running dogs, 48 years or more, I
had outrun him in my thoughts
returning to catfish and hushpuppies
wishing him good luck, returning to Sasha
and hopes and dreams of my own exile
socked in to Delta's humid human pain
where red lights dotted the other shore
I demurely drank again
from the precious nectar of life
not murky or muddy, like the river
but like the fine rushing water
of a mountain stream flowing down
from the higher ground
of Union Parish.
