Black Eagles and Angels

I am publishing here, with permission, two poems by my collaborator and creative cohort, Amy Trussell. We were fellow travelers on our recent trip to New Orleans where she was runner up for the Faulkner Society literary prize for poetry. Glimmers of our experience thread throughout both of these and I am flattered that one of them, Erzulie's Protégé, was written for me (!)

Black Eagles and Angels

Their throats always remain open once they decide to come forth-
The angels' trumpets that graced our door,
Our temporary holding place, halfway boarded up
When last we dipped into New Orleans.
These white ones are kin to the more state-altering blooms
that hold their seductive skirts and quilled pods
in vales of the Wild West.
Plots are there for the untameable and the cultivated too.
Even if you are in a place with opaque windows,
say in a dive waiting for Mardi Gras Indians to practice,
or a house that almost succumbed to hurricanes,
you can sense what is out there anyway, blue police light,
people on the streetcar full of desires, thinly veiled,
people making love and dying all over town.
This essence is what we drop under the tongue
when someone is going over the threshold to the other world.
It helps them row the light-flooded water back.
The African seer had told me there are ancestors
waiting to drum you into the other side.
So when you hear the Black Eagles call Indian Red,
you understand that this is the energy that could take you
over the edge, out past the bayous to heaven
where the shell games are played.
But it's also that which might bring you back,
down the funnel of the channeled flower, as deep
as night is long, waiting to turn itself out.
Some tribes say that zero is magic, the place to start over.
So if you get there and find yourself lost in a shotgun
apartment, you must turn to the creamy perfume
of the death-easers, then go inside, down the dark hall,
though your reptilian brain wants to flee your own grief
and the grief of the village too.
Pick up the dead lizard and wrap it in the kerchief for the altar.
Then twist on the water and let the sadness pour from
all that had begun to kink up the smooth muscle of the heart.
Cover your wounds in red earth and smother your pulse
points with come-to-me oil.
Blow out the candle, the hawk rests in a yard tree,
another refugee from the vortex.
I don't know what would happen if you dropped angels'
remedy beneath the roof of your mouth and kissed someone.
Are you willing to give yourself over that much?
After you make your X, will you stand in a crumbling cemetery
with arms outstretched, waiting for one or the other to set you free?

Amy Trussell, November 2008

Photo: A white Angels' Trumpet outside our "temporary holding place" in New Orleans.