Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

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Ponchatrain

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Reflection. Pausing, breathing deep, and looking back. I do that a lot, but not nearly enough to say I live in the past, just enough to remind myself from where I came. Sometimes, more often than not, a late night will find me going through old writing, looking for one sentence to spark a new fire. Something I might have missed the first time around. I'm not a revisionist, in fact I really don't like the process at all, but I do enjoy finding a catalyst in closed pages. And sometimes I'm surprised by entire pieces that are out of place in whatever journals they end up in. I should clarify.

I keep several different hardback journals at any one given time. One I share with another person, a sort of dialogue. One might be purly academic in nature, while the other is for quick whimsical thoughts. In this way I keep my thoughts less scattered around. Piles of paper got to be too much. The computer is...well lets face it, impersonal as hell when it comes to the writing process. My writing process. But there are flaws with everything. Having so many choices and works in progress makes it a pain when you just want something to write on. And when I travel I sometimes don't take the right one at all. Tonight I found a piece in a poetic journal that I'd forgotten about completely. It has no place being there. My finding it only took me back to a moment in time, not unlike a photograph in a yellowing album.

I share it with you now. No revision, no correction, verbatim.

Becky,

Though this seems to in great part be a book of poetry rather than prose I find myself having brought it along with plenty of poetic intention and, being so whole heartedly absorbed in the moments around me, having nothing to say at all. Nothing poetic that is.

I'm sitting on the banks of lake Ponchatrain in New Orleans after deciding the conference was/is a bust. Really, I'd rather be here with a copy of Steinbeck's novellas and a light cotton shirt anyhow. A fellow needs time to understand and put things into perspective.

The wind off Ponchatrain is warm and smells only the slightest bit like marshland. The concrete steps I sit on run right into the water, and the last two rows of them are covered by thick, green algae. On the buttresses of the steps it sways back and forth with the motion of lake Ponchatrain. Gulls fly overhead looking for food and there are a few scattered ducks too. TJ was right, there are no tourists in this spot. None but me. No T-shirt buying or market selling, Hurricane drinking, and Bourbon St., well, it's far, far away from this place. It's quiet here except for the passing or cars above and the pleasant lapping of the water against the concrete steps mixed with the cries of gulls by the dozen.

The horizon is sky and water and one sailboat drifts lazily along the lefthand side of my panoramic view. Down the way the Coast Guard preps boats behind Joe's place. Behind me there's a park, a high embankment of grass with more than one person asleep on it obstructs the view. A yellow building proudlt displays a sign reading, "Pirates' Cove Now Open" but it's locked up tight like the carnaval left town and only a lone man in a worn oxford shirt uses the payphone outside.

I remember yesterday riding the trolley to Autobaun Park. Sitting in the smooth wood seats, smelling the ozone from the wires as we slowed, stopped, picked up passengers, and gained speed again. The houses, each one, could be a postcard and some of them seem as unreal as Hanzel and Gretal's house of cake and candy deep in the Black Forest.

The fish are restless and it makes me think of the coming rain and the flight home. I hope it storms on us tonight with a cool wind similar, at least in texture, to the one in which I sit now...

goodnight 1.21.98