Pelican Tracks

Bedtime Legends near Esplanade

 Bedtime Legends near Esplanade After the Barq’s and the Big Red and the codfish cakes, War whoops and a six-handed assault on the parlor piano, After a run through every room of the house on North Broad, Greased weasels where the inner child should be, We slipped inside the loose pajamas, cousins from country and city, And called for Mama C., great-aunt, widow with a limp, To settle us like the soft sag of her old Sicilian face, Ready for bed and the dreams she would wring our sleep with, Not her monologue of morphadites on every corner in New York, But a creole tale, her voodoo story with a dago twist: In that tall house where the shadows lived, a lady of noble name Locked her slaves on the upper floor, chained in the cruel light, A woman who moved by day among the rich, the high families Who sent their sons to France and taught their daughters the small arts, Making the morning rounds, the afternoons of tea and politesse, The silver service giving back the bent sheen of her face. By night, should you linger near her grand mansion, idling To bring the matchblaze to your slim cigar, or to breathe The sweetened air of magnolias where the streetlamps burned, You would hear the buried moans, the faint shaking of shackles, A lash that cut deep across the black back of evening, Louder than the whispers passed at noon behind the silken fans Or the words swallowed as the wine went down in every glass, Rumors that left their stench like the stone well in her yard. And when she died, of poison or a bad heart or some spell No one would claim, the crowd in midnight ribbons and bombazine Broke the shutters open to the purifying sun, and found The guttered rite of candles, the altar blessed with blood,  And one slow servant who would lead them to the top, The long room like the hold of a trade ship, where living bones Were ringed with iron links at wrist and ankle, their eyes Starved deep into the head, dry tongues scraping the silence, And just beyond the blind doors that faced the front, a balcony From which she tossed the dead down into the wide maw of the well, A stock of white spikes and skulls, rainwater soup so foul The bottom seemed to heave and seethe with the odor of evil. And lying stiff under the sheets, we thought we knew The dark address of that house, three narrow levels rising far back Behind a wrought railing, a fence with pickets like a pitchfork. Sent off on errands of oysters or fresh bread from Esplanade, We stopped across the street from those haunted stories and stared Until we almost saw a glide of ghosts beyond the windows And heard the air rankle with a clank and chant and screams, Children who still believed the lies of early legends and late dreams. ...