Acts of God
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Acts of God
Outside, rowboats paddled up Canal Street while I was delivered howling by lantern in a hospital called Hôtel Dieu during a hurricane that knocked out New Orleans. I have a feel for rattling window panes, for rivers racing through sky, for heaven
flung endlessly down. This year August ends with God banging on the door like the police. Venetian blinds clatter against glass, gusts ripple through calendar pages back to the day of my birth, the steel wok hung by a hook from the rafter chimes an Angelus
against the skillet, curtains billow as I follow from bed to bed, room to room, city to city, continent to continent, capturing the wind like a spinnaker, covering weather maps with cyclonic swirls and arrows, over- flowing boundaries, sexes and time zones.
My kitchen globe brightens as the sky blackens and rising with the steam of a boiling kettle I approach my glory, the air finally matching my emergency, reaching for the same velocity, announcing ourselves with a loosened shutter back and forth against the side of the house.
James Nolan, a fifth-generation New Orleans native, is a widely published poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator. He is author of two volumes of poems—Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind—and his stories and essays have appeared in such periodicals as The Arkansas Review, North American Review, The Washington Post, and Shenandoah. He lives in the French Quarter, and currently directs the Loyola Writing Institute at Loyola University in New Orleans.
