I'm stumbling down the street and music floods

I'm stumbling down the street and music floods
out the door of this place. The thick brown mud
moves in the grooves of tires, the street jazz
bounces on the old walls and the buildings have
a language. There is a melody moving through
the gulf air, I am wandering in the New

Orleans heat. The night that the Moon was new
she read my palms and cards, the air was flooded
with smells. I moved intoxicated through
the streets and all I could smell was the mud
from the wide river. The big live oak trees have
expansive branches, she moves like a free jazz

through uptown with her running. I hear jazz
in the words of the street vendors, in the new
street car's rattling sound. The river has
its banks but breaks them, I can hear the flood
of rhythm moving outward. I'm moving like muddy
water over the sidewalk, I'm moving through

the Quarter in the morning. The light comes through
the ornamental wrought iron, the modal jazz
of overlapping conversation. There's a dark mud
in the Marigny when it rains, the paint is new
on a few houses. I remember when the flood
rolled through Mid City, where the city has

a lower floor. The Carrolton trees all have
these lazy branches that have grown out through
the power lines. I had a dream about a flood
of water bursting the levee, the awful jazz
of water in the grey carpet. I never knew
the mystery of the music, the way the mud

is used in rituals. The houses press in the mud
and move with the water table, the streets have
this dangerous quality. I'm looking at a new
image of her, the way she is moving through
the air and dancing. I'm in love with the jazz
of her shoulders and the way that her hair floods

her swelling breast. This jazz is a moving flood
like New Orleans, a music parading through
the thick brown mud that no other city has.