Rudbeckia
Rudbeckia
I will try to tell the truth about rudbeckia and whatever else comes up. In the year 1999, I first saw this flower in front of a library in Iowa City, Iowa. I only know this because I wrote sweet black eyed Susan, she, too, wilts and dies, and then later went on to write the words eleven nine ninety-nine. I liked the sound. I liked the idea that this combination would not be spoken again.
What if every day were to be faced with this notion, that what is happening here and now will never be repeated, that this moment contains every lesson we have ever needed.
In looking at the saboteurs that most often collude with the Judge inside my head I find old Randy Restless to be the most dedicated. Randy tells me that I always have to be doing something, that the rudbeckia around the pineapple guava could be gathered and spread to other spots. This wondrous perennial that makes her presence known in abandoned lots throughout the city with evening primrose and bidens alba.
What does it mean to be abandoned? What does it mean when land is parceled and each square becomes the sole responsibility of the one who has paid for this.
The birds don’t obey these demarcations. Not even the raccoons abide by such rules, for I found the ones I thought dead, in my backyard the day before yesterday.
I want to warn those raccoons, to let them know if they once again eat the paw paws from my tree I will find a gun and I will shoot them. Likely idle threats.
Like the memory (or was it a dream) of smoking with Kermit Ruffins and him telling me that you got to cook racoon with red gravy. Now that would be a plan that I could get down with, a concert where neighbors celebrated and Kermit brought out the grill and who knows who might skin those racoon and who knows how we might march down Poland wearing racoon tail caps and eating paw paw ice cream from go cups usually reserved for snowballs.
There are many possibilities within the reality that exists within the city. One is the seventy gunshots outside of Church’s Chicken yesterday that left a 34 year old man dead.
One neighbor said, “Sounded like a car backfiring. Like boom. Some heavy artillery shit.”
I saw the windows of the cars. Gone. I did not see bullet holes, almost as if a bomb rang through or some kind of sonic boom that shattered the glass.
But time is the sun, helping the day by. I have wilted, but I hold on, and I look inside to try to surprise myself to examine what it is that I know. Twenty years ago, I told stories of murder and jail and how New Orleans is different in an attempt to be special. That need to be special is here still, but not at the cost of death, not at the cost of a neighbor gone.
I don’t know if they have released the name of the dead yet. It becomes difficult to say that all is unfolding in divine order when the parking lot of the Church’s Chicken becomes a war zone. And it is hard to say that every moment is a lesson. And it is hard to say everything is either grace or an opportunity, when one lives and dies by the gun, when innocent children lose their lives, when mothers bury their sons.
My tears have worked with the sun. I am one. Eleven nine ninety-nine and outside then and outside now there are but more questions.
This is what happens when I sit down to write, an attempt to make sense of what happens while at the same time respecting the fact that certainty does not exist.
