Big Easy

Carnival horns blaring
Purple green and gold
Saints marching in
Slow and easy
Big Easy

A streetcar clanks down St. Charles Avenue
Beneath a live oak canopy
A tunnel of verdure
An arboreal aristocracy
Trailing grey moss beards

A white Lincoln glides down Tchoupitoulas
Cool and slow
Slow and easy
Big Easy

Ten miles away a pirogue rounds the bend
Of a back canal
Where levees weave a web of mystery
Beneath gesturing crowns
Of Cypress and live oak majesty

Birds, reptiles, and strange mammals thriving
Jen Laffite’s Captain lies peaceful
Entombed in marble and blessed
By a cutlass

Beneath moss-laden limbs
Tenebrous in the brackish breeze
Ghosts rest easy here
Lulled by the barge’s horn
And the hornbill’s cry

When I die
Let my soul drift down
The Mississippi
And I’ll rent a room in The Quarter