GULF MUSIC

Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la,

Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bella, wella-wah.

The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated

Galveston, Texas. Some 8,000 people died.

The Pearl City almost obliterated. Still the worst natural

Calamity in American history, Woh mallah-walla.

Eight years later Morris Eisenberg sailing from Lübeck

Entered the States through the still-wounded port of Galveston.

1908, eeloo hotesy, hotesy-ahnoo, hotesy ahnoo mi-Mizraim.

Or you could say “Morris” was his name. A Moshe.

Ippa Fano wanna bella woh. The New Orleans musician called

Professor Longhair was named Henry Roeland Byrd.

Not heroic not nostalgic not learned. Made-up names:

Hum a few bars and we’ll homme-la-la. Woh ohma-dallah.

Longhair or Henry and his wife Alice joined the Civil Defense

Special Forces 714. Alice was a Colonel, he a Lieutenant.

Here they are in uniforms and caps, pistols in holsters.

Hotesy anno, Ippa Fano trah ma dollah, tra la la.

Morris took the name “Eisenberg” after the rich man from

His shtetl who in 1908 owned a town in Arkansas.

Most of this is made up, but the immigration papers did

Require him to renounce all loyalty to Czar Nicholas.

As he signed to that, he must have thought to himself

The Yiddish equivalent of No Problem, Mah la belle.

Hotesy hotesy-ahno. Wella-mallah widda dallah,

Mah fanna-well. A townful of people named Eisenberg.

The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious.

The man was correct when he said it’s not even past.

Look up at the waters from the causeway where you stand:

Lime causeway made of grunts and halfway-forgettings

On a foundation of crushed oyster shells. Roadbed

Paved with abandonments, shored up by haunts.

Becky was a teenager married to an older man. After she

Met Morris, in 1910 or so, she swapped Eisenbergs.

They rode out of Arkansas on his motorcycle, well-ah-way.

Wed-away. “Mizraim” is Egypt, I remember that much.

The storm bulldozed Galveston with a great rake of debris,

In the September heat the smell of the dead was unbearable.

Hotesy hotesy ahnoo. “Professor” the New Orleans title

For any piano player. He had a Caribbean left hand,

A boogie-woogie right. Civil Defense Special Forces 714

Organized for disasters, mainly hurricanes. Floods.

New Orleans style borrowing this and that, ah wail-ah-way la-la,

They probably got “714” from Joe Friday’s badge number

On Dragnet. Jack Webb chose the number in memory

Of Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs, the old record.

As living memory of the great hurricanes of the thirties

And the fifties dissolved, Civil Defense Forces 714

Also dissolved, washed away for well or ill—yet nothing

Ever entirely abandoned though generations forget, and ah

Well the partial forgetting embellishes everything all the more:

Alla-mallah, mi-Mizraim, try my tra-la, hotesy-totesy.

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.

Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his

Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised end?

All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.

Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned

For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.