Sighting Ghosts of Spanish Galleons

Oak Alley Plantation - Vacherie, Louisiana

"Remembering Cafe du Monde"

was first published in

The Chariton Review

at Truman State University

in the Spring 2002 issue.

Remembering Café du Monde,

New Orleans: Early Morning, 

Independence Day, 1994

James Hart

for Nathaniel

Words your mother said the other day,

about knowing the last time was the last

so we might remember it, made me recall

the morning you and I awakened early

and left the others sleeping as we ambled

through the Quarter, foreigners at home

here on Independence Day, our port of call

the alley streets sweating mist, dawn rain

just past, the sun stretching past our backs

to light the Mississippi’s massive commerce

moving slow leviathans toward the Gulf.

I didn’t give much thought then, I’m sure,

to how a river divides a father and a son

as it widens and runs to opposing flows.

To show you how the world expands us,

I said I’d take you to the Café du Monde

and let you order beignets and cafe au lait,

grown-up food finer than juice and toast.

I know you didn’t blink an eye at your first

hot sip, while I quickly watered down mine

with ice and praised the heavenly pastries,

and you reached for more, sprinkling sugar

from your lips onto your sleeve like a child’s

floating, sprightly talk, a vessel on the move.

I don’t remember what casual words we said,

plans perhaps for our trip up the River Road

to hunt old houses or boats afloat on dreams,

maybe promising you’d see Oak Alley’s past

channel sunlight’s timeless shadows under

a tunnel of ancient trees, ghosts of Spanish

galleons waving mossy sails in the river air,

or how your brother feared every black face

he saw whispered voodoo as he turned away.

So was that the last time I was the captain

of your world as we stood on the river walk

watching tankers bound for Cairo, imagining

Algiers just across the river lay half a world

away from us in tropic climates of the mind?

And now, like Magellan, you circumnavigate

a globe of silence, a resolutely mute hostility

that swells its sails before your father’s wind,

and just as I vanished from my father’s eyes,

I too could tell you there’s no new otherland

here for you to name, wilderness claimed ages

ago when a boy in feathers sought the sun,

and I too found my father in time’s Acheron

embracing darkness where you will follow

when the river running so wide between us

circles back through space on comets’ tails,

falls in rocket glares on these amber islands.