Dragonflies, glittering and unafraid, gem-eyes set into their heads like expensive rings, settling on fringed ferns. Grasshoppers, large and striped green and brown and yellow, quiet against brick walls from which paint peels. Choirs of cicadas with voices pulsing to techno beats, turning the tall oaks into huge overhead synthesizers. Big dusty moths the color of turmeric. In the swamp, love bugs mating on the fly: tiny two-headed beasties dressed chic as you please in red and black for their hot aerial dates. Whirligig beetles swarming over the surface of the water, no miracles required. Sleek lime-sherbet-green lizards disappearing behind leaves. Alligators, moving long and lean and languid through tea-colored rivers whose bright duckweed cover is broken by the undulating hills of their rocky brown backs; they push swollen water hyacinths about as they go. Stalk-legged ibises. Swift white egrets flashing like bright bits of sheet against azure bayou sky. Great blue herons, enormous and graceful in the air. Little blue herons hiding between the stubby orange fingers of cypress roots while lazy turtles slip off the sides of logs. Red trumpet vine flowers and yellow St. John’s Wort, wild with calm. All the creeping things that creep upon the earth, all the whirring things that doppler past the ear, all the swimming things that slide beneath the water, all the winging things that mount above the trees, and all the green and growing things that carpet and ascend this grubby blue planet.

Songs and their singers on every street corner and just inside every bar, thick sweet sound hanging in the humid air before it drips note by note into existence, the honey of it pulling at your feet and slowing your stride till you stop at a corner to listen, too drowsy on early morning ale to take another hot, syrupy step. The city wears music like a sheen of sweat on its burnt copper skin, it bursts out and is pushed out of the long throats of trumpets and saxophones and the raspy lungs of accordions, and late at night while the lights on Bourbon Street glare and people stumble, drunk and lost, out of its dumbfounding confusion and piss-stained sidewalks, somewhere else the smooth sound of piano and voice still gentle a tired heart.

Food to feed that heart: crawfish, red fish, shrimp lobster oyster squid grits and grillades po’boys muffalettas etouffees café au laits beignets and a fine dust of powdered sugar settling over everything, everyone, everywhere.

Grand old stone mausoleums big as New York city kitchens, housing whole families — weeds grow up around their bases. Wide, dirty water marks taller than a man’s head ringing the walls of buildings. Houses whose porches sag like weary smiles, whose windows flash with broken glass tears. Debris and trash. Swollen wood.

Katrina t-shirts, 3 dollars a pop. Mayor Ray Nagin jokes. Mardi Gras beads. Feathered masks; boas the color of a Pride Day flag; creased queens in last night’s pink lipstick and smeared eyeshadow; molasses-voiced women with molasses skin telling your fortune under plastic canopies next to Jackson Square, laughter thrilling their bodies as they lean back in their folding chairs and then grow solemn again, eyes on your cards. Folks going to work and folks coming home again; folks living in trailers and vine-draped mansions; folks thanking you twice and three times for visiting; the empty spaces that folks who can’t come back have left.

*******

With the help of Justin at the Genius Bar I’ve managed to postpone the inevitable death of my languishing hard drive long enough to back up the data on it, but tomorrow morning my shiny silver laptop is going back to its creators to be serviced and I’ll be without a computer for several days. So no New Orleans pictures yet. If you have fingers to cross, please cross them in the hope that the technician who opens the box and turns on my powerbook will spend enough time with it to realize that the hard drive is in fact about to fail, and not simply send it back with a note that they can’t duplicate the problem. That’s happened to me before, and it will be a gigantic pain in the ass if it happens again. In fact, fingers aren’t enough — cross everything you can cross. Thanks!