Acorn from Oak Alley Plantation

                                             for B. Aline Johnson

Blue mist off the river vining trees
with morning sapphire—there is
much to be said for shade:
funeral lines of families
marching straight out
past beauty’s legacy, past
seasons of architecture
Etruscan, Creole pink in the soft
stucco—the past settling into tourist
museum, country park folly:
what must it have been like
these insufficiencies of sufficiency
slave shacks fieldside, their
stilted perches, the scratch yards
in the old photographs
a quarter-mile promenade
chaining the shadow life
to the bittersweet
fields, at the levee
the plantation store swallowed
whole from time and space
pecan grove, sugarcane fields
vanished with the fading prints
now only to be surmised
along with our crucified Lord
hanging from a guest room wall
the decorator’s touch
of a faithful interior history—
even boyhood secrets of erased
garçonnières predictable
like seasons, open to night
vision, wetnesses, river calliopes
the edgy clarity of youth:
no world quite adequate inside
or from the wrapping verandahs
for the dreams here once, before
azaleas cerise brilliant
rose in live oak shade—from this
allée, Aline, the acorn you took
with you and planted at Métairie
now on its way to immensity
took root beyond the politics of
remembering, pinched economies
of the past—in the aperture of day
outgrowing arguments we still have
with shadow, shade.

—originally published by Arkansas Review