Smoke

How the cavemen dead

Cold in New Orleans. A fire kind of day. A leftover-soup-heated-on-the-stove-with-mushrooms-collected-long-ago kind of day. Wood ears they call them. For the way they sit, the way they curl and fold like the cartilage on the side of your head.

I did not do anything other than wait for the rain. These mushrooms prefer the dead branches of elderberry and hackberry and will even grow on the dead  limbs of dwarf tamarillo. They are part of the constant cycle. They eat the dead. The Chinese put them in hot and sour soup. I add them to a pot of miso and eggs in the 9th Ward of New Orleans.

When I was born my mother did not know you could put an egg into soup. She never did embrace the idea. It took my living in another country. It took mornings before school at plastic tables on plastic chairs and what the people called soon dubu in stone bowls before the jacketed taxi drivers.

I would sit and listen. I could not always understand. I felt like a witness. Some days I felt famous. Some days the old old men would tell me stories of American soldiers. They would tell me in broken English.

The morning was one where I wanted to stay under the blankets. With shivering hands I made my way outside to light a fire still burning. I ran my hands through my hair. I felt my face. I took the garbage of the people who stayed next door and found lasagna and almost a whole sandwich.

The mother hen fought with a rooster over the last bits of the lasagna. The rooster won. The rooster had her own brood of four hens I watched grow up last year. 

When the cold goes from your hands you can write in the second person. When these hands know your face you remember the other days you kept warm. You remember nights along the river. You remember waking in the morning after not showering for days. The sweat of your body on you. Your clothes smoke.

The times you stopped in cities along the river and those in the little cafes and coffee shops could smell you before you entered. Maybe there was a memory back in their DNA. A memory from a time when the only heat known came from fire. They were drawn to you. They asked what you were doing.

So many said, “I want to do that. I want to go somewhere.”

In towns all along the river you never could have known that you would own a home in the 9th Ward, that the fire then would become this fire now, that you could sit at a picnic table in the noon day sun and know Cuba by the way the yellow flowers of tithonia blow in the wind.

There is more to be cleared away. You find logs riddled with holes. You know the homes of bees. The way these creatures must be nomadic, like the Australian wanderers, leaving the spaces they have created to enter your creation. To enter the creations of others down the road. To enter the creation that knows no hands and take nectar from all that lives together.

There is space for you to hang a hammock, time for you to lie and do nothing. And sometimes nothing is better done with someone. You think this. You know the way a bird eats from a hackberry tree. The way he sings and calls his honey to come share.

There are bird houses to be built, videos to be made, steps to take before the end of the year, steps to take before the end of the day.

And maybe, when you walk into the gym, a man will smell fire and remember who he is. You will give the gift of what never leaves, of what courses through history from baby to baby. This abundance of a mushroom provided without thought, given to you to sit on this cold day.

The sun you forgot when you awoke. The shadow of a tree. The ever present smoke. This becomes a black cat that rose out of nowhere to climb atop a fallen mulberry tree that never would have held her were it not for a hurricane named Ida.

If you can remember that all exists without the need for a name, you, too, will understand the meaning of smoke.