ST. CLAUDE AVENUE SWEET

By Lee Meitzen Grue      

Cars in  blue shades, throbbing, shuddering

rap-tuous babooms down St. Claude beating

smoky  busses blazoned:

St. Claude to Lizardi, St. Claude to Refinery,

fuming over

the corrupt,  incorruptible - the strung out body of Saint Claude,

who lies

nodding in Treme, past St. Augustine's and

Elie's courtyard where

reclusive poets call from high skirted porches

chant litanies and conjure.

The church swallows loas, all saints

sweet. The  big peasant rests at the cross roads:

Esplanade near Polaris, the spinning North star.

St. Claude's lone talkers stalk the littered banquette,

ecstatic prophesiers

sermonizing

in raggedy clothes, breathy hair dreaming

to better things in unlikely places:

King Roger's:

Pickled Tips, Hot Sausage, Cowan, and Coon.

Beard's Auto Repair:

No catting, no loitering, no crack, the Hi Ho, the Saturn Bar,

St. Roch Market:  Plate Lunches, Blue Crabs, Boil Crawfish.

Friday in this some time catholic city.  Get Your GED.

In the yard of the fan shop

at St. Claude and Elysian Fields

a woman offers BJ's for two dollars, goes

down for a bag of potato chips:  Crack.  Crank,

This too is life. 

At Press Street,

children pass over and under boxcars, daring

wheels to turn.

People in cars

wait for the train to pass,

impatient

circle in the dust of the gravel road,

cut to beat the train.

A long mournful whistle begs them not to cross.  Don't cross.

I'm coming.  Tell me,  Babe sang, "Don't you want to go?"

St. Claude hangs out in the yellow pages -- Texaco,

Nome Credit Union, the Whitney Bank, and Mandich's:

Got downtown pride and corpus derelicti

Caged grocers count out change, Hank's Po Boys

in  white paper, take out Chinese in styrofoam.

Rainbow houses, boarded up houses, things

falling down,

shot up and drive by: Frederick Douglas and

Washington school, and won't things

get better sometime soon. The principal locks out the tardy.

Emergency picks up a body in a hallway on St. Claude. On Mardi Gras Day: 

Indians of the Yellow Pocahontas

dance over the bridge, down the Avenue.

Make way for the chief! Shaking his headdress

he's come to sing for his mama whose name is Alma.

Past Desire, Piety, Pauline, past my street to Poland Avenue where

St. Claude's ancient knees lift over the levee.   Bridge up

drivers take a slow breath,

a moment from the day to watch the boats pass,

and far down there by Harry Sterling

incorruptible toes stretch

into the lower nine past

the Louis Armstrong Elementary School

where the fat man Antoine Domino lives in the pink,

smack dab in the middle of his old neighborhood.

Hooray! for the neighborhood, any neighborhood

where people call each other by name,

And they call the saint.  They call him

the St. Claude Pharmacy, the St.  Claude Handy Hardware.

They call him everyday,

but there are not enough prayers

to call him back.

St. Claude Avenue is walled by the dispossessed,

one pay check away from homeless 

as new residents sing out:

Gentrify! Gentrify!

until we B & B  ourselves Disney.

St. Claude needs a miracle.  Needs one bad.

On this broad Avenue good people abide.

 To sustain glory in the name

of the people we must all abide.