If April is the cruelest month, May is the one most resplendent of warmth not yet grown too powerful. The month when even the weary might fancy one more turn round the dance floor.

Outside my dormer windows magnolia trees bloom and the heady jasmine fights for control of the night. Through the window I can see the good ship Atlantic Forest back again at the Mandeville wharf. She sits high on the flooding River, most of her house visible above the gray slate roofs leading down (up?) to the water's edge.

L.A. Norma is back from Los Angeles and we agreed to meet for lunch at La Spiga Ink, on Chartres near The River. The tiny bakery café is crowded but we find a table - the cheese and pecan biscuits are to die for. Norma flips The Times-Picayune over so as to hide "That man's goofy face."

"That man" is President of the United States and his tangled tongue has been assuring an increasingly nervous public that he is solidly in control. Norma is not so sure. Inside the paper, political pundits say not to worry, he is not. They say he turned over the choir of cleaning up the spy plane incident to 'White House adults'. "Whomever, thank God," Norma snorts.

Norma thinks the flyers are home because "Jessie Jackson threatened to go to China and negotiate their release," leaving Baby Bush and his 'adults' with egg foo young on their collective face.

There were no photos of Bush with the returning spy plane crew or with White House Easter egg kiddies or much of anything else. No meetings with Harvard and MIT brains. Only appearances at high schools, junior colleges and the miner league Zephyrs Baseball Stadium, where he pledged to take from the poor in The City and give to the rich in the suburbs. I have my doubts, but the rich cheered.

As usual there were no questions, so no one asked about Bush's threat earlier that morning on national TV to go to war with China. Hey, what's war rattling compared to a cool blue day inside a new publicly funded sport's facility - who says the rich are dumb?

"Do you get the feeling Bush has been nipping at the arsenic water longer than the rest of us," Norma asked?

Could be, not even Cokie Roberts' shameless skills at proving she is not her Mother's liberal could find the talk show words to explain away Bush on arsenic water. Though it is possible to see how arsenic in water might benefit those who put it there, there is no way to spin it into something good for those who drink that water.

Western miners slop arsenic around their trailings with nary a thought to ever cleaning up the mess. Then it comes washing down The Mississippi River bound for New Orleans' kitchen taps. But don't fret over distant poison, the misnamed Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals knew in 1998 (before Clinton declared arsenic a greater hazard than sex in the Oval Office) that arsenic levels where high in the waters of Georgia Gulf's Plaquemine Parish plant. They knew it and failed to tell us until after the Bush 'adults' had declared arsenic okey-dokey for wee the people.

This is important, Mr. President and Louisiana Health and Hospital folks, please write it down: arsenic is a poison!

Nonetheless, It is Spring, a time for all Louisiana festivals. Maybe next year we should have an arsenic-water festival? "Pass me that big mudbug, Norma. Don't you just love the way that subtle hint of arsenic brings out their hidden flavor?"

One more drop: A memorable moment came at the recent Tennessee Williams Festival when Christine Wiltz, author of THE LAST MADAM, A LIFE IN THE NEW ORLEANS UNDERWOLD (Faber & Faber), told of using the real names of those about whom she wrote. All but one. "That one," she said, glancing around Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre, "promised to kill me if I used his name." Some kinds of censorship just make sense.

The last drip: The Triennial at the New Orleans Museum of Art is great and the last one to be curated by the retiring, yet steady hand of nearby-faraway French Quarter resident Bill Fagely. It contains a knock out piece by Sharon Jacques and selected visual arts students from Faubourg Marigny's own New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). The work is titled "The Opening" and believe me, you will not overlook it.

"It's May, It's May, the lusty month of May
When everyone is brimming with fun, wholesome and un
-- The song of Camelot