A Mouse-child's Mardi Gras Memory

There are no cats on Dauphin Street. They’re in the tamales, father said, sold by the hairy-handed man wearing the monkey suit who turns the crank on his hurdy-gurdy Maxie called it when the parade came late and cotton candy smelled of dinner time. The child was lost, long before, afraid and wandering in and out of the great cathedral, silent afraid to wake the saints sleeping ‘neath the 3-ply carpet there, where stood the marble bowl with the blood of Jesus and who would think to drive nails into the feet of the nice-a bearded man who suffered the little children. Wooly-eyed priests lounge forlorn on the concrete porch, Lent-fearing paraders floating go by, catching with their empty prayers virgin serpentine still wrapped in cellophane, un-pierced smelling of Mobile summer still here in February not quite gone. If I stand here by these backward collared killers will I die as mother claims? Saint Bartholomew mrdered her mother four centuries before, 55,000 on his day, killed them with fire, stood them beside a post, kindled round with kindling and kindly set them all afire, their smoke smellable 10,000 years. I will go hence from here to wait by the scale they weigh on at the bakery where pictures of cream puffs line the walls and gracious odors lading the air with the smells of wealth. She will be there where the scales are free and the great moon face of the dial where the weights are told shines like the moon.

She must have come . . . at last . . . or the mouse-child would still be lost . . . in Wragg Swamp watching Comic Cowboys rope Hitler and Mussolini, selling their carcasses still warm to the Krew of Columbus revelers, Death chasng Life around a pole, beating the flying fire out of him with what Momma said were inflated pig bladders but looked to the child like hard balloons with exploding firecrackers set off by Life's sizzling ass when Death's aim was good . . . and confetti fell like stars in distant skies along the streets stunk up by burning flares the night the floats came by, pulled by careless horses men were paid (they said) to clean up after . . . and now that the days have died, seems a helluva sorry way to make a living, no way to see the floats and the drunken mountebanks, masked to hide their moles, she said, beauty best beheld beneath dark veils, or so said sweet Isabella bargaining her virtue for a guiltless sibbling's life in a Mardi Gras made real on a London stage.

Dreams no longer dreamt, golden crosses bent by falling planes and dying men . . . in a heaven of steeplejacks working without a net. Brave days.