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White Night
The sky is consumed with stars and moon.
A white cardinal explodes from a bush,
and his brown wife follows.
Crows fly in pairs over the cemetery,
into a group of willows, and fall asleep without sound.
Near midnight, a bareback boy draws
circles in dust under the heavy moonlight.
His mother calls for him through an open
window, but he does not move.
At the edge of town, a dead angel
lies face up in a ditch.
Blue flies pour from its ivory mouth.
Lines Written in an Abandoned Cathedral Near the Sea
1.
You are older than you ever imagined--
there is no song to sing you to sleep.
2.
All day long, I have circled the cemetery,
have caressed the granite walls,
and drowned in her memory.
3.
There was an ocean and a wave,
and then nothing.
4.
Finally, I saw the sky
for the first time,
and knew I was home.
5.
In the red of red,
in the blue of blue,
you will not find God here.
6.
There is so little to dying,
itŐs a wonder we bother at all.
7.
I have seen stone and fish
fall from the sky,
when the night was quiet
as moth wings.
8.
Nothing can frighten us more
than chancing to see our face
in the mirror by moonlight.
9.
Think of nothing
but the large birds
feeding on the shore.
Louis Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1970, to a working class family and raised primarily in New Orleans East along the Bayou Sauvage. At the age of 18, he was involved in a serious car accident that resulted in the loss of his left arm. He says, "This led me to the gifts that reading poetry and writing poetry have to offer. In a certain sense, poetry has given me a new life. I'm fairly certain that the [above] poems do not deal with disability in a direct sense. More likely, they represent a mind that is trying to come to terms with a world that is indifferent to all things, including a person with a disability."
"I left New Orleans when I was 19 to attend college at Louisiana State University. In 1996, I earned a BA in English and was the first graduate of the University of Mississippi's new MFA program in creative writing in 2002."
Currently, I'm an instructor of English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. I am also poetry editor of the university's literary journal, Yalobusha Review. I've published over 80 poems in America and Europe in such journals as The Southern Review, Parnassus, The Oxford American, Poem, and Tundra. My first book of poetry,Olga, is forthcoming in 2005 by Four Way Books."
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