—as I called you, because you were more than "the natural" —

(you called me DJ3, "DJ Jazzy Jake," recalling my extreme fascination with sampling and my old-school youth)

I remember an afternoon in New Orleans, meeting at the appointed moment at the Absinthe House, a place you'd chosen even before you'd gone inside

and you were there with your glass of distilled envy

and we picked up again from some other time, sitting together with our back to the street in that town where even the light seems old, antique

distilled, then aged

*

Levis:

Oh live oak, thoughtless beauty in a century of pulpy memoirs, Spreading into the early morning sunlight As if it could never be otherwise, as if it were all a pure proclamation of leaves & a final quiet—

•

But it's all or nothing in this life; it's smallpox, quicklime, & fire.
It's the extinct whistling of an infantry; it is all the faded rosettes of blood
Turning into this amnesia of billboards & the ceaseless hunh? of traffic.
It goes on & I go with it; it spreads into the sun & air & throws out a fast shade
That will never sleep, and I go with it; it breaks Lincoln & Poe into small drops of oil spreading
Into endless swirls on the water, & I recognized the pattern:

*

There is another memory here. One that's so right, it seems as if I should keep it to myself.

Another weekend in New Orleans, a Sunday morning, everything still, shuttered.

I am walking across New Orleans, out of the quarter, uptown. I'm trying to angle my walk so I can catch the St. Charles streetcar about 20 blocks ahead and take it almost to the end of the line and meet a friend who'd just moved there.

I am walking down a street that looks comprised entirely of garages, old signs. Everything is sleeping.

Then I hear the sound: the purest cry of pain I have ever heard.

I look up, and I see two pigeons on a sign-pole. Two adult birds. One is injured and crying.

The other one is wrapping a wing around the first.

And the cry goes on, as I walk down the street with that image, knowing I will keep it for some time to come.

*

Levis, again:

And it's not as if you held your one wing, tattered as it was, in contempt
For being only one. It's not as if you were frivolous.
It's not like that. It's not like that at all.
Riding beside me, your seat belt around your invisible waist. Sweet Nothing.
Sweet, sweet Nothing.

*

Today, we are there in that light, in that distillation and age, and those birds are still there, as they always are, in my mind, on that lost and curving street which, like many streets in New Orleans, echoes the river, and the river is there that gathers everything and keeps it. And we are raising our glasses, one green, the other copper, again.