This special event called "Celebration Sunday" consists of poems interspersed with jazz piano pieces - all by Don.
WHAT'S MARDI GRAS?
What's Mardi Gras?
Do be foolish, it's the time to!
Before you're marked by ashes,
LIVE!
Before you die with all that music in you.
What's Mardi Gras?
Touching the source of creation,
The collective wellspring.
"Whadya' say, Preacher?"
The Divine!
What's Mardi Gras?
Movement.
Stand in one spot for ten hours
And see the continuous parade
Of humanity - dancing.
What's Mardi Gras?
Agelessness.
Time out, time before time,
The centenarian carouses with babe in arms.
Clocks stop.
What's Mardi Gras?
More than a party,
A religiously human affair
Both ribald and sacrosanct
Both curse and prayer.
What's Mardi Gras?
Life on display,
Birth, death and hope,
Indulgence in the face
Of mystery.
WONTCHA' COME ALONG WITH ME?
Wontcha' come along with me
On that sentimental journey
To the hot and humid heart of things:
New Orleans, land of dreams,
Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras
Let's have a party,
Let's celebrate!
It's a religious thing we do.
A TOURIST GUIDE TO NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans: jazz funerals (only place in the universe where people look forward to dyin' so they can have an excuse for a party), the my-mouth-is-havin'-a-party town, the macho-seductress place, the home of writers, grifters, grabbers, blues-note chanteuses, gospel choristers, slave quarters, shot-gun houses, cornstalk fences, uptown mansions, debutante balls, 24-hour bars, street jazz, street cars, city of experimenters, rebels (southern and northern varieties), boundary pushers, drug pushers, place of class consciousness, official corruption, expected confusion, horrible crimes of passion (it's etiquette to have at least one murder over something sexual in your family every generation), pages and pages of Boudreauxs in the phone book, shrimp, priests, jambalaya, doubloons, beads, Popeye's extra spicy friend chicken, gumbo, Creoles, Cajuns, quadroons, casquette girls, crayfish etoufette, nuns still in habits, riverboats, shrimp remoulade, pirates, dampness, bogs, alligator stew, pale-faced tourists looking for the deeper side of their humanity, zydico, vertigo, the variegated sacred-profanity of it all: New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS AT ANY HOUR
Bacchus bumps into the Willie Lomans of the world,
And preacher man he delivers to the denizens of the red light Quarter.
While Marie Laveau and her Voodoo dolls look on.
So out staggers this slicker-than-a-possum-round-a-gator politico
Buyin' votes from antique furniture dealers on Rue Royal and from drifters on dope,
While entranced tourists, bellies distended by blackened this fish and remoulade that dish,
Ride the creaking carriages pulled by less-than-winged steeds
Over the cobblestones, past St. Louis Cathedral where its ghosts of sinners and saints come marchin' in,
Past Pirate Alley, and its phantoms of Jean Lafitte and riverboat gamblers,
Down Burgundy and its slave quarters turned pensions,
Out of the Vieux Carre to the swamps and up to the celestial firmament where sits
The Sun King of old France, his golden age struggling to beam through the gathering clouds.
And everywhere, on any day of the week this below-sea-level habitat awaits another deluge, another party, another long, hot time in the old town;
Everywhere even in your sleep there's jazz.
Ah! The Jazz!
JAZZ IT TO ME!
The bitter-sweet of the jazz club,
Pulsar of the universe,
Guide to time travelers seeking memories
Of lost loves, failed hopes -
Bar voyagers requiring advice:
What's the meaning of life?
Why go on?
Willow weep for me...
Barroom air so smoky the blues has a hard time cuttin' through,
Willow weep for me...
Sing it, mamma,
Tell it like it is.
Go on and cry me a river...
Love?
Ain't no such thing.
Some day he'll come along...
I'm here.
The man I love...
I'm waitin'.
Birds gotta' fly and fish gotta' swim...
And I gotta' go home.
Go on and...
Love?
Cry me...
Love?
A river...
Love?
Cry me a river, I cried a river over you...
Jazz it to me!
WE SING THE RIVER
Oh, father-mother river,
Old man-old woman river,
Catfish river, and snake river,
Possum and coon and rat river,
Primeval mud river,
Crayfish and the livin'-is-easy-and-slow river,
God-knows-what-is-breathin'-in-that-river river,
Dixie beer bottle river,
And mid-August naked boy river
Oil can and industrial waste river,
And drifting aimlessly on a home-made raft river,
Over your banks and cause havoc river,
Calliope on the paddle wheeler river,
Family outing on a lazy Sunday afternoon river,
Lovers under the moonlight on the levee river,
And pirates sneakin' in their booty river,
And Mark Twain bigger-than-life river,
And southern belle and riverboat queen river,
And courtly gentleman and hustler gambler river,
River of cool blues and hot sun river,
Of commerce and grandeur, of revelry and survival river,
Of naked nymphs and satyrs rolling in the mud river,
We sing the river poetic,
We sing the river tragic and gray, the river mysterious and primal river,
We sing the indecent, torrential, raging, murky, willful, imperturbable, secretive, glorious river:
MISSISSIPPI!
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE!
Someone made a mistake, surely:
A city below the level of the sea?
Somebody's joke - an underworld place!
A deity's nightmare, unless he's Neptune -
But even he couldn't have stood all those alligators in his front yard,
And dead rats floating by just above his head.
So, the old houses in the French Quarter have big hooks in their carriage houses,
To hold the rowboats required in time of liquid emergencies -
(In a town where there are more emergencies than ordinary events.)
And the old houses are built up a few feet off the ground, held up in the humid air by piles of bricks -
Making a cozy hiding place and appreciated shade under the house where dogs and cats and drunken uncles can sleep it off on a hot summer's day.
But the new houses don't have hooks or rowboats - just cars in their garages that get their bucket seats filled with sewer water when the floods come.
The new houses, under which wooden pilings have been pounded into the earth lengthwise,
Get wet -
Very wet.
And sometimes filled with mud
And with the things that crawl in the mud.
At least the new houses don't have as many cockroaches as the old houses - (their being cemented-in and air-tight);
Then again, the new houses are so cemented-in and air-tight that the poison from the exterminator sprays gets trapped -
Thereby causing much mental distortion
(Which might be of great benefit for someone living in such a swamp.)
As for the dead (the wealthy ones), they're above ground in their new Cemented-in and air-tight homes, waiting out the duration, marbleized for a spell;
Above ground, but not much above (like in heaven),
While the poor wait in the mud for their salvation.
RELIGION WITH STYLE
New Orleanians who don't go to a bar on Sunday morning, or aren't already in one from the night before,
Go o church.
Any kind of church, although the Catholic-Fundamentalist pews are the most crowded.
Has something to do with making restitution for the previous week's tomfoolery.
Has something to do, if you are a descendent of slaves, with connection: to the suffering of the fields and the degradation of the master's whip.
It is a class and ethnic thing, like everywhere else.
Except in this town, this city at the river's turning,
The folk expect a richness to their religious celebrations -
Having grown accustomed to fire and spectacle in their weather and food.
These southern folk expect to be moved as much by priestly pomp as they are by their nerves-on-end coffee with chicory;
They want their gospel choirs to be hot and transcendent like their Tabasco sauce.
There is no milkiness to their theology.
Their holy places breathe in a city with ersatz demi-gods and earnest reprobates.
St. Francis would have to quick-change into a Bourbon street tap dancer or go mad;
St. Dionysus would readily put a down payment on a condo and set up shop.
On one side of town, electronic organs and guitars (both neutered of minor chords),
Accompany the vocal renderings of rock gospel vocalists who dance a Las Vegas routine,
Thereby uplifting the spirits (if not the libidos) of the White elect.
While the preacher brings them to their knees in repentance and jubilation;
To tears and big dollar bills.
Meantime on the other side of town, in the houses of African American worship,
A jumpin'-to-high-heaven preacher, swaying choristers and frenzied
congregants fanning themselves to reduce the fever,
Reach rapture and pass out in the name of Jesus -
Only to be dragged down the aisle and resurrected
Until the next fit of religion.
Praise the Lord!
Amen!
And Amen!
The following poem was not included in the service, but is part of this collection of poems:
TO THE WARRIORS
Row upon row,
Like dragon's teeth rising into the mist of early morning,
The cemetery markers of the fallen warriors
Beckon remembrance:
"Do not forget us!"
Willows lament over the graves,
A distant riverboat wails.
Then...the quiet;
The rage of the cannon silenced,
The gunpowder dried up
Like the bones of the men in this unforgiving bog.
Once, the yell for the rebel cause:
The Confederacy, the Valhalla of a proud people;
Once, the troubadour nightingale promising eternities on earth.
Once, when warriors were young, before they set off to war
With martial music enticing them to their deaths.
"Do not forget us!"
No, we will not -
Nor those who fell before and after you on both sides.
May light shine through the mist,
Lest we forget,
Lest we forget.