Gordon Walmsley

The Spirit of New Orleans
by Gordon Walmsley

The Spirit of New Orleans never was an airplanesputtering blindly to Paris
but she always prayed towards Paris
and bought her rouge there too.
And though she often trembled
she never had a face-lift
for why should she be someone else
when half the country was crazy?
And even if everyone said it was dangerous
she always smoked wherever she liked, holding outagainst the three strains of american madness:proselytizing, sententiousness and asceticism.
Some say she wore at least seven veils, as a form of protection,whose colors changed depending on the company
and that she never removed them when she slept with the President, the Pope or the Ghost of France.

And because they were veils, they were often transparentthough as the years washed on she began to add glitter
so if you weren’t careful you might be dazzled and forget to look. Being gregarious, she was abundant in progeny and the memories they spawned:
a phantasmagoria of water and fires and caving earth, of would-be soldiers who thought they were god’s priests
and would-be priests who thought they were god’s soldiers. “They’re both crazy and equally dangerous,”she would mutter to herself as she washed herself in the morning.And though thoughts still get entangled in her veilsAnd though she tries to cover her tracks as best she can,
her history is reflected in the footprints of the heavens and is there to be read by those who can read such things.

She tends to fall asleep these days when the water ebbs and rises waking only at the point of balance. At such moments she is known to have lucid intervals and is fully capable of writing a testament. Then she falls asleep again while we her children become once more the victims of her nightmares or feel, to our relief, the gentle caress of her musings. It is then she can bring forth the most capricious of smiles. She even smiled while my great-grandfather spent his final hour
listening to the radio. He couldn’t die before he knew whether Lindberg had made it to Paris. And when the news came in
he breathed his sigh. And the Spirit of New Orleans sighed too because she was fond of rouge.

Twine

In the world of broken hearts
we came to the river of understanding
wading out until we disappeared
we went down
glimpsing opening shells
and the rainbow of the sea
and the grasses never touched us
till we rose to walk the other side
by the river of earthly tasks

In the land of broken dreams
we did what we could
so people might learn tolerance
and not be crazy
because people were falling apart
their dreams no longer touching
the deepest part of a wound
in the land of scattered masks
when the waters were not friendly

In the city of broken nights
I vowed not to take my neighbor´s shadow
for the real thing
but to leave it to its earthly task of
mirroring the gloom
my own dull slag creates
and I laid a prism on my heart
to change it to a rounding sun
or a standing figure
blessed with light
it would go right straight through to me
so I could remember
hold sacred
at least one thing
in the people you meet

In the house of sounds
walls were so thin
you could hear the neighbours whisper
voices flowed from room to room
bursting bubbles or lancing wounds
and we were filled with the noise of others
or a more mellifluous gift
a deeper kind of harmony
that comes when we
begin to discern
each of us bears a string of tones
we allow by grace to sound
and sounding along with the others
is like a marriage of all the brass bells
in every window of the house
and before the silent door
the place of rushing waters.

In the room of the shell
we lay the fragments
piece to piece
setting again the swirling conch
at the centre of the table
we set the cups
divide the bread
invite the neighbors in
and through the rainbow of the sea
we try to make out
the contours of a dream:
a ship full of prostitutes, thieves and shame-faced priests
is sailing to some northern place where the air should be
purer
each of us bearing the fragment of a shell
each fragment bearing an alphabet´s letter
each letter bearing a sound in its womb

Gordon Walmsley is from New Orleans. He has lived for the past twenty or so years in Copenhagen. He has published a number of poetry collections. He received a degree in German Literature from Princeton University and attended Law School, receiving a degree he never used. Never intended to use. He edits The Copenhagen Review an attempt to educate writers as to what their neighboring colleagues are up to. The magazine takes places in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and English.