Mardi Gras 1999: A Hiatus in the Festivities - Poem

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Rochelle Robinson

A soft note, not quite blue, yet still effective

drips tears through air.

It moves through the steam of coffee cups

at various tables of a room smoked gray.

Her stare invades the grease in my hair,

parts it in places before resting in my eyes.

I am her instrument for the night,

the lucky one.

I allow her song to enter me.

She allows me to enter her.

It drips slowly, adding moisture to a starchy room.

Into my ears it creeps and lingers, making motions,

before sliding down my spine, poshing into my gut,

resting there, like a bee in death's honey.

It takes from me what I do not have, do not know.

Butterflies die in the process.

And I am consumed by the history of Black band's soliloquy.

Fingers snap, hips sway and a head bobs

on a songstress whose milky eyes make me long

to be her breast-feeding babe.

The rotund man rolls melodies from his brass

as easily as the sweat rolls from his collar,

as easily as she rolls through me.

I am given a secret which no Ouija board can tell.

I am allowed to feel the color,

to beat in the drumsticks of a chain-smoking drummer

whose slot-machined eyes tell me

there really is some comfort in hard alcohol.

The sweet melancholy a master of blues creates,

rapes liquor of its properties, humbles the strongest alcoholic,

sobers me.

Longing for the infinite, I find the finite,

in a rusted room on Bourbon Street.

All for the love of color, I melt into it,

becoming a holiday.

Rochelle Robinson is Assistant Professor of English at Olive-Harvey College in Chicago, Illinois.