Shome Dasgupta

A Louisiana Sestina

Layered mists over dewed green grass fields—a Cajun espresso sunrise,

a rooster sings from across the pond where minnows tend to their ripples.

Stubborn hay bales and rusted tractors make a palace for a whiskered rabbit,

and a tilted barn—stripped and ripped—with unhinged doors, emits a history

of chickens and horses and barefoot shovels. A wooden rocking chair, still—

chipped and toothless, waits for a familiar snout to rest upon its split skin.

Dirt and pebbles—glittered glass, stained with holy paint, a shine. Its skin

shimmers, casting gleam and light upon a terrain echoing under the sunrise.

Cowbells: wind chime, lulling a sleep to find a blanket of blades, soft and still.

A whisper of fried green tomatoes—a gumbo on the horizon, its scent ripples,

sauntering in like humid mosquitos on a summer night full of a fabled history.

Dandelion dreams sprinkle a manured air—Gulf winds raise ears of a rabbit.

A solo Eastern Phoebe perches on a branch, in conversation with a rabbit.

The language of nature where no translation is needed—a kindred of skin.

Cayenne and jalapeño peppers sprouting, they know the tongue’s history,

and how the evenings disappear and blend into the dawn’s hues of a sunrise

—a bayou born to plant its southern seeds. Dispersed through zydeco ripples,

a Vermilion threads a blanket for crawfish ponds and rice fields—never still.

Rustic trucks blooming with sugar cane—a harvest moon, teardrops still

falling from the sky until the ashes flitter away onto the nose of a rabbit.

Magnolia trees and oak carved canoes find reflections in a pond’s ripples,

a rested turtle upon the banks swivels its head—darting pecans, hard skin

meets its mirror, a shell for a shell, and a pelican floats below the sunrise.

Caked acres and irrigated soil continue to replenish its own fertilized history.

You—once a ghost, a myth, creating your own rougarou in a flooded history.

Now alive, in peace with river palettes—a spectral hazed statue standing still

among electric wires and power surges. Perhaps, one winter, a cold sunrise

when you evaporated into my mind, fiery and furious, leaving a field rabbit

to nibble on your remnants and debris. A rural Sistine Chapel of folklore skin,

where we danced in sunflower ant piles—castles of reverberations and ripples.

I’m sitting here this morning, marinating—we were a story never read, that ripples

down the Atchafalaya stemming from our hands and how they once held a history.

Soon, a moss filled moon—I’m at the dinner table eating alone, remembering skin

and a peach to quench a spiced throat full of a Louisiana red. Keep memories still

I whisper to a plain of dawn’s horizon and sit back and extend a palm to a rabbit,

your only mirage while an armadillo licks its paws and scutters away to the sunrise.

A hen’s laughter ripples from beyond a fog, and my friend—a deer stands still,

a glance and a nod, she lets me know our history lives in the eyes of the rabbit.

I rub the goosebumps on my skin and listen to the twilight waltz of the sunrise.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, Atchafalaya Darling (Belle Point Press), The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books), Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), and Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Emerson Review, New Orleans Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.