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 Bonfires on the Levee for Burt Cestia Late autumn days we labor in the swamps Or by the river bank’s entangled brush Gathering cane and willow wood to dry, Then cut and stack and soak in kerosene— Towers showing the way to Papa Noël Riding over the beaches and the bluffs— Lining the River Road near Baton Rouge Where north Louisiana yields at last, Though stubbornly, to customs of the south White cotton bolls becoming sweet green cane And the Mississippi, ready for the Gulf, Foaming in salt beyond the salted marsh. Then when Christmas Eve recedes into a night So distant from the shepherds and the Star, We torch the settled base-logs one by one Watching fires rise more like the beaconed peaks That spread from Troy to Thrace and Thessaly Than candles of the body and the blood. Unchristened constellations made to blaze Beyond the last millennium’s passing end— The stars’ coeval gleamings in the dark Appear as faintest signals from a source Whose love would touch each bonfire’s sparkling bark Even in this remotest holy post. And by such light we glimpse what sense commends In this strange state subsiding like our lives From foothills of the Ozarks rippling out In gardens of the strong-stemmed Shreveport rose Down through the dense Kisatchie once preserved By Carrie Dormon’s will into the central farms Of soybeans and corn then further on below South to the bottomlands whose fallow mold The wild strawberries redden every spring And plump mushrooms make white in autumn dawns Where settlers three short centuries ago Parted man-high grass and saw the buffalo.  Such are the chief ingredients of our roux— The mantled sands and gravels, oil and gas Welling from ancient deltas, rising domes Pushed up from the mother-bed of primal salt All thickening this rich gumbo eons stirred— The fossil olives, laurels, hollies, figs, Gullies of maidenhair untouched by spring’s Chill sun, late winter’s early mallows Trembling in a telic realm where bears Coming to fish under a Hunter’s Moon Paw deeply in the streams for goggle-eyes Or maul dried hives for honey in the noon. And now as the last charred logs collapse in ash Blown twinkling in the cindered distances Over the farther arpents’ sunken clays We give ourselves to what we had possessed Too rudely in the day, this drained estate Through which the river straining at its banks Crests like the fallen waters Noah rode When Chaos broke again through its black crevasse Out of the leveed heavens whose bonfires Like our own declare the drifted silt Poured off a shelving continent’s worn edge To lie undredged over DeSoto’s bones. ...

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