Poems About the Night Sky — Written on the Water in South Louisiana

The Sky You've Never Seen Until You've Seen It From the Water

There are places in this country where the sky still belongs to itself. Dulac, Louisiana is one of them. Drive south out of Houma on Highway 57, past the last gas station, past the last set of streetlights, until the road narrows and the live oaks lean in and the marsh opens up on either side of you. Keep going. The houses thin. The pavement thins. By the time you get to the dock it is already dark in a way most Americans have forgotten dark can be — no porch lights, no parking-lot glow, no halo of city spilling up out of the horizon. Just water and air and a black so deep it hums. And then you look up.

The best poems about the night sky are written from underneath a sky like that. Not from a city park. Not from a cabin in a national forest where the trees still box you in. From the open deck of a boat, two miles out into the marsh, where the horizon is uninterrupted in every direction and the stars come down all the way to the water on every side. The Milky Way, when it shows up out there, is not a smudge. It is a river of light. It pours from one edge of the sky to the other and it doubles itself in the black water under your feet and for a minute you can't tell which one is real.

Mitchell Parfait grew up under that sky. He is a poet from Dulac, Louisiana, a fishing town at the bottom edge of Terrebonne Parish where the land runs out and the Gulf takes over. The men in his family went out before dawn for as long as he can remember, and that meant he learned the night sky the way other boys learned street names — by walking under it, by sleeping under it, by waiting for the engines to warm up under it, week after week, season after season. The poems in DULAC POETRY carry that sky on their backs. Forty-five poems, forty-five pages, written for the kind of reader who has stood under stars they couldn't put into words and wanted somebody else to have done it for them.

Reading the Sky the Way the Old Men Did

Before there was GPS, before there was Loran, before there was a chart-plotter glowing blue in the cabin of every shrimp boat from Cocodrie to Empire, the men out of Dulac read the sky. They knew which star to put on the bow at what hour to keep the boat running due south for the deeper water. They knew the rough place where the moon would set on a Thursday in October because they had been watching it set there every Thursday in October for thirty years. They knew that if a particular bright thing was standing where it shouldn't be, the front was coming in faster than the radio said it was, and they had better turn for home before the wind picked up. That kind of literacy doesn't survive in a generation that grew up indoors. It only survives if somebody wrote it down. The best night sky poetry is one of the few places it still gets written.

The old men in Dulac never used the word astronomy. They wouldn't have known the names of half the constellations spelled out the way a textbook spells them. But they knew the names they had given them themselves — the hook, the dipper, the three brothers, the cross, the morning star, the boat. They knew which way the boat pointed when its bow lined up under what star, and that was orientation enough. The sky for them was not decoration. It was a working chart. It told them where they were and what time it was and what the weather was doing twelve hours ahead, all in the same glance, and they read it the way a mechanic reads an engine — quickly, fluently, without congratu- lating themselves for it. That is the kind of practical sky DULAC POETRY is interested in. Not the sky of postcards. The sky of work.

And the poems do not announce that they are poems about stargazing any more than the men announced that they were stargazers. They are men who looked up because they had to. The stargazing got done in the doing. That is one of the quiet arguments running underneath the whole book — that the people who know a thing best are usually the ones who never thought to give it a fancy name.

Alone on the Water Isn't Lonely Under That Sky

People who have never spent a night on a small boat assume it must be lonely. They picture a man by himself, miles from anyone, and they imagine the silence pressing in. The men who have actually done it know better. There is a particular quality to being alone on the water at three in the morning under a clear sky that has very little to do with loneliness. The stars are company. Not in a sentimental, bumper-sticker way. In a real way. They are there, every one of them, all of them at once, and they are doing something — moving slow across the sky, marking the hour, telling you when the night will turn into morning. You are not alone. You are in a room with the oldest furniture in the world.

That is the territory the best Southern poetry about nature stakes out — the difference between solitude and loneliness. A poet who has never worked a boat can describe the stars beautifully, but the gap shows. He'll write the stars as a backdrop for some interior emotional weather. The poet who has actually anchored alone on the bayou writes them differently. He writes them as a presence. He writes the way a man writes about a friend who has been quiet for a long time but is right there in the room with him. The poem “Pray”, which sits at the heart of DULAC POETRY, is one of those poems. It is set on the water. It is set under stars. And its loneliness is not loneliness, it is something deeper and stranger — the feeling of being looked back at by something that doesn't need to speak.

The same readers who came to this book through the poems about the sea will find that the night-sky poems work in the same key. They were written by the same man under the same conditions — at anchor, alone, engine off, water lapping the hull, sky doing what it does. Poems about the stars and the sea written from a real boat by a real fisherman are a small, specific genre, and there isn't much of it. This book belongs in it.

Looking Up and Believing in Something Larger

There is a reason that almost every culture in human history built its gods up in the sky. You stand under a Gulf Coast night sky long enough and you understand it without anybody having to explain it to you. The scale of it is the scale of the thing the old prophets were trying to point at. You are very small. You were going to be small whether you liked it or not. The sky was here before any of your problems and it will be here after them, and there is something about the math of that — your size against its size — that is not crushing but oddly comforting. It puts you in your place, which turns out to be where you wanted to be all along.

That is the territory the poems about faith in this collection grow up out of. The faith of a man on the water at night is not the faith of a sermon or a creed. It is the faith of a man who has seen the sky open up over him a thousand times and has stopped pretending he doesn't feel the weight of it. He prays. Not formally. Not loudly. He says something quiet under his breath that he wouldn't say in front of anybody else, and then he goes back to checking the line. That kind of prayer is everywhere in DULAC POETRY. It is the prayer of a man who has learned, over a lifetime under stars, that something is listening, and that the right response to it is to keep working and keep looking up.

And there is hope in that — the slow, durable, blue-collar kind of hope that doesn't require everything to make sense. Just that the sky keeps coming up. The sun keeps coming up after it. The boat still starts. The work still goes on. Hope on the bayou is held together by repetition, by ritual, by the simple fact that the stars came up tonight the same way they came up the night you were born and the night your daddy was born and the night his daddy was born. There is a continuity to it that is its own kind of religion. The poems hold it without ever quite naming it.

Stand Under a Sky Like That, On the Page

Most of us are not going to spend a night anchored alone under the Gulf sky. Our nights are loud. Our skies are cropped down to a strip of haze between two roof lines. The stars we get are the three or four bright ones that punch through the city light, and we have grown so used to that small allotment that we have forgotten what it's like to be under the real thing. That is what a book like this is for. It is a way to stand under a sky like that, on the page, for the time it takes to read a poem. For five minutes you are out on the water. For five minutes the air is salt and cold and the only sound is water on hull and the only light is the light from however many billion miles away. And then you close the book and the city is still the city, but something in you is a little quieter than it was before you opened it.

That is what the best poems about stars do. They give you back a sky you didn't know you were missing. They give you back a way of looking up that the world kept trying to train out of you. They give you back the small, specific, durable wonder of being a person under a sky too big for you, doing what small specific people do under sky like that — looking up, keeping working, saying something quiet, going home.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

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