It’s Crude

Texaco. A lovely word. Ma chérie mâle. But I’m sick,

Shell-Belle. I’m driving slowly on guano. Seuls de petits

fragments existent encore, you hear that drilling apparatus?

After death I ought to hear new things. Loveless Shell-Belle.

Heroin contessa. Port Arthur baby with your downy blood,

your mothership hums: Drank folks, clay folks, gay folks now

we ghost, we host—whale oil, explosions at sea, Corpus Christi,

slamming junk on the roof of the company truck. Gray clouds

wash clean the wily Cajun boys: ratty-haired Boudreaux dreamin’

roughneckin’ and flappin’ snow angels in the miracle tides of crude:

                                    I shall swell the Gulf with limitless thunder

                                    & I shall become fabulously rich on finite life

                                    & five hundred years later my cordgrass grave

                                    will feel like a cold curtain of sweat across fore-

                                    heads from Pascagoula to white hull Plymouth

                                    & my crewmen shall become creosoted demi-

                                    gods pimping out the last Acadian paddlefish

                                    until thy oxcarts overwhelm the great interstate.

But who’s gonna pay my daddy, your uncle, $6,000

for his medical bills? Fell from the company crane,

broke three-hundred bones and ripped his Stetson

on the seismic testing site. Now who will biosonar

for minimum wage? The swamp-humpers’ children

overdosed on timid little vocabularies, drill drill drill,

but it ain’t comme il faut if it ain’t laissez les bon temps

rouler—so we gotta get them leviathans rolling. Jack-up!

Drillship! Toadstool! Petronius! Hear me pray: I’m sick,

sick as hell, Shell-Belle, and it’s nothin’ like your reasons.

Listen, you’ve got your lubricant and I’ve got mine. Gas

prices poppin’ unprecedented champagnes, and Lord,

if that means I gotta bury some cousins beneath layers

of salt domes and deepwater impounding, I mean, shit,

tell me how I’m s’posed to discover my own El Dorado

without a full tank and five generations of faceless red-

necks born facedown in the wailing gusher?