We always leave New Iberia, Louisiana in the spring when
Teche country is at its most lush. Sunday morning, we're bound for The Mountain
in Sewanee, Tennessee where the weather forecasters report that there'll be
several nights in the low 20's yet to come. I look out at the Japanese magnolia
putting out deep lavender blooms and wish that I could take the entire tree
with me. A few days ago I featured this lovely tree in the last poem of a new
book I've written entitled Departures.
Departures is a book I hadn't planned to write this winter while still in
south Louisiana but was inspired to complete through corresponding with Darrell
Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate who's working on a new chapbook about a
famous Cajun country musician.
Darrell has inspired and influenced my writing since the day
I walked into a Creative Writing class at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette
twenty-five years ago. He has a generous spirit and always finds something
"precious" in the expressions of poets he mentors, and when he
critiques your work, you find that the gentle shifts he suggests for certain lines of the poems only make you feel as though you're discovering how to develop the confidence
needed to help you spring forward.
Several months ago, Darrell gifted me with the one book of
his poetry that I didn't have on my shelves, an earlier work entitled
Burnt Water Suite, published in
1999. To me, this book shows the full range of his poetic abilities and honors
his appreciation for places further afield than his native south Louisiana—Sarajevo,
Russia, France...I'm always impressed by Darrell's cosmopolitan views. He knows
as much about music, art, and philosophy as he does about poetry—a visit to his
home in Churchpoint, Louisiana is like a tour of an art gallery, and he says
modestly that had he not become a poet, he'd have taught art history. He also
speaks with easy familiarity about Bach and Mozart, and about the music compositions
of Olivier Messiaen and Arvo Part, two composers I had to research when he
mentioned them to me!
In the endnotes to
Burnt Water Suite, Darrell explains that the "burnt water" in his
title is:
"a reference to the opposition that engenders all creation and to
the created thing itself. It is at once both the phenomenal and the pervasive
Urge that creates all being. It is then flower, sex, poem, person as well as
the necessitating force or desire that resides in all matter...cities and
civilizations are founded on an image: the union of opposites, water and fire,
and was the metaphor for the foundation of the city of Mexico..."
This is
a difficult passage, perhaps, but it explains the metaphysical inclinations of
Darrell's work.
I've always loved Darrell's "odes" to his mother,
and in "My Mother's Foot," he is at his lyrical best, particularly in
the lines:
"I am trying to say beloved/I am trying to keep the baskets
from spilling... I am calling blessed the arc of blood/I am saying this
story is not about to end."
Readers may be moved to say, "And I hope
your stories never end," for these elegies are as transporting as the sacred
music he appreciates.
Darrell once dubbed me a metaphysician, but he's the poet
whose metaphysical gifts are represented in "Night Prayer On Returning
from Tuscany:"
"O sweet little room flanked by others/ just like it
where my friends lie/like elder monks drifting to another world/on day
thoughts/-the problems and the progress of the acolytes, /-the weeds in the
herb garden, /...where next year's lavender seeds will come from..."
I read this praiseworthy book again and again, and it speaks
to my condition, as the Quakers say. Darrell's communications to fellow poets
and sharing of his work are salutes to the spirit of art and play impulse
within all of us. He's a writer who knows every
word matters when you engage with other poets and writers...and what you
say to the world should be true but uplifting. This outstanding south Louisiana
poet is one of the major personas I
will miss as I move forward to another sojourn on The Mountain.
His life passed before me, and my grief is deeper than sentiment, blood thicker than all the sins he buried in the garden he made for his wife, colors made bolder in a place where he could not hide his soul. "The place" dead-ended in a small wood and was surrounded by a tall cedar fence. Several small bungalows flanked a stone and cedar house with a square bay window in front. Flowers covered every space in the yard—yellow nasturtiums, red salvia, petunias, hollyhock—blossoms hovering over stones and settled among small pieces of driftwood. Birdbaths nestled in clumps of elephant ears and fern; begonias in
wooden tubs. It was a place of nooks and wooden bridges, and at the farthermost point of the yard, a forest of cedars and redwoods loomed.
Ineffably, part of him will go down into the soil that nourished his plants; the rest will ride the wild, blue waves of the Pacific that he was always painting. And I have the photographs in the notebook and the covers of most of my poetry books for which he rendered beautiful paintings—valuable keepsakes that reflect a kind of artistic endurance.
