Christopher Bratton
| The old enameled bathtub crouches on claws and captures enough water to bury me, as if in a well-dug, well-decorated, well-deep hole. With my ears sinking below, I hear the hundred years of chatter that these pipes casually eavesdropped: the argument in the basement about how much watered-down, doctor-prescribed whiskey was worth, the joyous laughter on the balcony at a first taste of a perfectly ripe, though mottled and ugly, summer sweet pear. Below those murmurs, rising to drown them, music wells up, saturated in echo. As the hot water seeps into my ears, I hear Amédé Ardoin hugging his accordion and wailing with a voice out of reach, as though he had stopped by the St. James Apartments in September of 1929, on his way from Evangeline Parish to Louisville, to soothe us with a song in French, we can’t even comprehend, but in hopes that we would recall its melody the next day when everything in the world seemed departed, like the frivolous suds caressing the drain on the way down. |
