In the Joie de Vivre Café
Breaux Bridge, Louisiana
We are sitting in the Joie de Vivre Café
in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana sipping
chamomile tea and eating the day’s
moist oatmeal and raisin cookies
in Saturday afternoon sunlight.
I’m gazing into a photo
by Greg Girard of morning sunlight
settling onto young cypress trees
inCocodrie Swamp and drift
back to decades ago when Sid
and Sonja Dupois floated us
by boat into the Atchafalaya.
In this afternoon and morning
light I feel Sid’s presence once again
and he returns out of the dark
strumming his Gibson guitar
at the next table over. He sings,
“My love, she speaks like silence”
and shows me his new painting
of the glowing old white Cajun
house next door to their neo-Cajun
one and we sip beer and I hum
along. He compliments me
“for cultivating your better side
in writing poems about Indiana.”
He’s glad we are back in his Louisiana.
This sunlight I feel coming in through
the window mingles with the sunlight
on those young swamp cypress
in Greg’s magical realism photograph
and I close my eyes and know you
can taste sunlight in different ways
depending on the direction from
which it slants and you can sip it
hot or warm and in the rays
you ingest it brings back the spirits
of those gone who live in us
wherever we sit and reflect opening
ourselves to what light brings back
and wherever it wants to take us.
Horses Munching Grass, Blue Field, Evening
A brown and a black horse
munch grass close together
in a field below mountains
as the evening turns shades
of blue. The mountains are dark blue.
The sky stretched above is pale blue.
The only sound is the ripping of grass
by the horses' teeth. I am not close
enough to hear this sound now,
but it resounds in my head because
two days ago these same two horses
came up to this casita right
across the fence as I stood watching
and happily listening on a balcony
as they ripped and munched grass.
The sound of brown and black horses
munching green grass in a blue field
below mountains with a thin strip
of white clouds skimming the top
of the mountains and white-blossoming
weeds in the foreground is a painting
framed in my mind which I will carry away
with me when I drive down from the mountains
where a part of me remains as eye and ear.
Northern New Mexico Night
for Katherine
You come into the presence
of this place so remote
in its quiet beauty,
a voice gentle in its insistence
on what is right but not obtrusive,
like one of the countless stars
in the northern New Mexico night
that sends its delayed light
toward me, as I look out the window,
from millions of years ago
but nonetheless fully present
in ways I do not fathom.
Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate and emeritus prof. of English at Long Island Univ., is married to Katherine Trahan of Lafayette , LA and has been in love with New Mexico also since they first visited there in 1975. His latest of eleven poetry collections is Catholic Boy Blues: A Poet’s Journal of Healing. For info on that collection about child abuse and his other work visit www.krapfpoetry.com
