The Mississippi's Lament

I feed flies and ear stingers
spreading rumors

I am dead, the black mud
crusting my shallows and shores

the decomposition,
of the old man.

My currents may be wrinkles
and my meandering dementia,

but I am still alive,
speaking pictures for souls.

I never left the continent
of my sadness and shroud

my laments in shade
and shadows.

I oracle more prophecies
than the Ganges or the Yellow.

I am a thesaurus of pain
and I censure anyone

Failing to read me
at dusk when I recite

the litany of the lost,
the drowned, the suicides.

I disprove the allurements
of romance and fictions.

I swallow butterflies, vain
and vacuous tenants of the air,

and have sired scaly skinned
renegades of remorse--

gar, cottonmouth, and cormorants,
the harbingers of my woe.

I am the Delta's author
and its punishment,

a fugitive of myself.

The Blues Bus

It always arrives near
amnesia, the blues bus
carrying a pilgrimage of voices.

A ringless man
sips dulled memories
of a round woman, and

children at Christmas,
until the last taste
of Southern Comfort

lingers in his throat,
the foiled fictions
he has spoken too long.

A graying lady paroled
just a few days ago recites
the names of men who double

crossed her; but she forgets
their faces.

She wears earplugs
to keep from crying
herself awake.

A wrinkled drummer
mumbles the guarantees
he used to promise customers

now asleep on levees just over
the horizon at this windless dusk.

Night enters
trees and towns
as the bus passes
other ruined memories

until oncoming headlights
go mute and darkness
swallows the passengers'
voices

and the bus stops.

It has moved
beyond memory

and words.

Philip C. Kolin, Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) at the Univ. of Southern Mississippi and Emeritus Editor of the Southern Quarterly, has published more than forty books including Emmett Till in Different States: Poems and co-edited with Jack Bedell Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River.