Article voiceover
The sun beyond the Crescent City Connection Rises on the muddy Mississippi delta As a barge goes gliding by in search of cargo And lonely seabirds float and then take flight To try their luck upstream or perhaps Resort to plundering garbage bins On Tchoupitoulas Street, where bins Are overflowing like a bad connection In a busy airport where perhaps Some hapless traveler on a redeye Delta Scrambled in useless panic to miss the flight While baggage got tossed in with the wrong cargo Headed for some conveyor belt where the cargo Of lost souls drifts dreamily by and the bins You put your shoes in when your flight Is at the gate and your phone loses its connection As you grope for it muttering bravo charlie delta To yourself from the dream you had perhaps Last night in which there were perhaps A host of seemingly random symbols like the cargo Of your unconscious mind converging in the delta Factor mentioned by Walker Percy whose Covington bins Contained the manuscripts of a missed connection, So he thought, when in fact imagination had taken flight And a masterpiece of American Literature, like the flight Of a lost Pelican or Richard Widmark perhaps In Panic in the Streets with its public health connection Or fill in the blanks with your own cargo Of dreams stashed away in attic bins, The alpha, the omega, and, somewhere in between, the delta, Which Percy called the breakthrough into delta Dawn, the sudden awakening into the flight Of language, where words become like bins Of glory, carrying shared meaning, perhaps, Fantastic pieces of illuminated cargo Gazed upon and forming an electrified connection Of I and thou, a connection like the sunrise on the delta Shared in the cargo of a poem taking flight From New Orleans perhaps in ghostly bins.
Slow clap, standing.
Meditating on this. Powerful imagery. Been trying to empty some of the bins here before they’re discovered, thinking maybe the kids deserve to know things after all.