Across The Little Golden Gate
Saturday, July 21, 2007
 II.7.3
Welcome to this week's "Here and Now." Lots of good stuff for you, hope you enjoy.
Susan Holahanm has, to put it most modestly, an impressive resume. With both a Ph.D.. in English and a law degree from Yale, she has taught writing at Yale and University of Rochester, practiced law in Connecticut, worked as an editor at Newsday and the Yale University Press, as well as writing and publishing her own poetry. Her poems have appeared in Agni, Crazyhorse and The Women's Review of Books. Her fiction has appeared in, among other places, American Short Fiction,Icarus, and the anthology Bitches and Sad Ladies.
This poem is from her book Sister Betty Reads the Whole You.
How Light, for Example
makes our living, light makes our life where we live, makes how I live - like lead in New Haven, damp on Long Island, empty I thought in Dallas. But here in Rochester the usual platinum light makes another life altogether, which is yours, or you.
Here's where you get the speaking part you've angled for. That day clouds hid our eclipse till after lunch we couldn't help it. We crept out to not-look at the sun while it was leaving us a mere annulus. The tulips stilled. You said the light felt thin and I thought, lavender?
violet? with gray like before a summer storm - diluted, rubbed. Last night that dream again tore me; both of us in a warehouse separate in crowds of strangers, me struggling to write to you and I admit I didn't own boots. Let me tell you everything looked dark.

I wrote this on a rainy afternoon while listening to one of our local college radio stations, KRTU - 91.7 of Trinity University. They play jazz, all shapes, flavors and varieties (except dixieland) 18 hours a day. The station is also available on the web. I recommend them.
jazz on the radio
jazz on the radio sax aching soul weary I can't place him but it's one of the old guys I know from the solos the pulse a heart beat transformed and embellished constant steady the art of life the life of art pulsing steady and constant many of the masters dead this year every month another two or three gone but the beat goes on the old vinyl discs reassuring the pulse of the art still strong lives end but never the music ends reassuring the life of art the art of life constant steady jazz on the radio settles the day around me smoothes the mechanics of living

This is as close as I could come to finding biographic information on the web for Doc Dachtler, He has lived and worked in Nevada County for over 35 years. He is as much a social historian as he a poet and storyteller. Doc's writing often deals with everyday rural life and the people and events that weave the fabric of community he calls home. Doc has worked as a one-room schoolteacher at the North Columbia Schoolhouse and currently plies his skills in the trades as a carpenter. He is widely published and is credited with two books of poetry, Drawknife (1985) and Waiting for Chains at Pearl's (1990). He is also the founder of Poison Oak Press, specializing in limited edition letterpress poetry broadsides. To listen to Doc Dachtler is to sit in his living room, share a cup of coffee and enjoy the company of a friend. Unless there are several Doc Dachtler, he has also worked as an actor and general contractor.
These poems are from his second book of poetry Waiting for Chains at Pearl's.
The Bear After the Poker Game
After the poker game I drove to North Columbia as best I could all the windows down for fresh air. About a mile and a half out of Cherokee I came upon a black bear running up the road in a loose lope. There were beehives on the flat just to the left I slowed down. The bear slowed down then left the road to the left. I wished I was headed toward some honey at 3 a.m.
Siding
for Pam Kowal who told me the name of the siding we were putting on a house was Dollie Varton. I said I didn't know that but I'd like to meet her.
Hooking the chalk line on the end of the 1x10 walking the 16 feet to the other end hefting the worm drive skill 77 saw triggering the blue arc in the shadow of the case whirls the blade dancing dust from the last cut. Before the fresh chips (dancing the night before with the women of the Ridge) and the end of the day I feel my body thinning out my hair thinning out my vision thinning out yet clear as a snapped blue line cut away on a tricky piece of siding.

Doc Dachtler seems like an interesting fellow. Here's a man I've been interested in for several years, a man of mystery in a plain bland wrapper.
Invisible man
white hair short and neatly shorn shaved and nicely dressed he has the look of a retired watchmaker with a kind of blank intensity that comes to a craftsman of small things
he seems a shy man quiet working hard at invisibility as he comes in every morning lays down his bed roll and backpack on one of the upholstered chairs visits the men's room to tidy up then spends an hour in the music section donning the headsets at each listening station from classical to rap to country to jazz, to conjunto listens to them all then picks up a book and returns to his gear and has one coffee as he reads for about an hour sometimes closing his eyes for a moment or two but never sleeping like the regular bums who come in especially in the winter when the cold outside pushes them into whatever shelter the can find
I see him every now and then walking alongside the road with backpack and bedroll and though I am curious about his life and about simple questions like where he sleeps and where he eats and how he got to the life he's living now he doesn't seem the type of man who would welcome questions leading to attention and requiring visibility

Steve Healey teaches writing to prisoners in several Minnesota Correctional Facilities and is Associate Editor of Conduit Magazine. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Open city, and Verse.
This poem is from his first book earthling.
tilt
Long after winding down the party keeps winding down.
It smiles in the gridlocked smoke long after swizzle sticks tell the journey about no one going home with someone along the underground story lines,
and I remember the part where you said you can't even remember the good parts. Here's my self-portrait
as conveyor belt, I've no further questions. Here's the case of missing bridges
or the justice system of little girls, I've heard them chant like pickled banshees:
bubblegum, bubblegum, in a dish, how many pieces do you wish?
One, two million, a deluge of yes, yet missing from the deluge can be sweet,
or no or two placed carefully at points of least resistance, so heaven's close enough to taste. I wonder if that's the voice
who took me across the water last week "halfway between ice ages."
It was mild, yes, with scattered clouds, which came to see us as ideal listeners squinting at the silent parts.
Imagine receiving Aaron Burr's bullet on the cliffs of Weehawken, and according to their address, Lucy and Ricky lived at the bottom of the East River,
says the voice that becomes an ocean no one knows exactly where.
It's all atoms anyway, largely excreted by faraway stars as part of an old bedtime story. This carbon atom,
for example, has never died, and since we've never been to sleep, how many bridges have we built to feed this megalopolis? Only later
do they offer the consolation of not having been, I mean it's never dark here,
and look at those trees happy to wallow in ignorance of autumn's coming.
Or the fruit, vibrant gray, outside the bodega. Or the fruit, balanced on technicolor curves. Or the cut flowers,
like men in a tilting city. Or a man curls around a fountain while a water blossom
keeps petal-falling back around its pushing through. Or a man keeps
circling the park, nibbling it with his yes-shaped mouth.

High School English teacher S. Thomas Summers has been with us before with poems from his Civil War book in progress. These two poems are from his most recent book. Rather, It Should Shine, published by Pudding House Publications in June of this year.
For more information about Scott's books, including how to purchase them, go to his website at www.freewebs.com/sthomassummers. Or, you can just click on the link on the right.
Here are the poems.
To Have and to Hold
Night winds plucked last leaves off the tall elm, pasted each crimson blotch to the house - a constellation of age spots.
Now I see how much the paint has faded, how it curls off the wood shingles - eyelashes curling away from an old face.
I ask if you'd prefer a new color. You spoon sugar n my coffee, scrape a finger across my toast for a taste of jam and say
Perhaps, but the old blue feels more like home.
Fudd Finally Fells Rabbit
The newsstands sell out in minutes. The networks cancel scheduled programming as their anchors straighten ties, apply
blush and spill the bloody news. The bunny had been resting under a tree, munching a carrot, humming a waltz. Fudd claims
he crept as "sy-went-wee as a cat." When the departed began to dance with an invisible love, the bald hunter aimed his shotgun's
sights between the rodent's bucked teeth, alleges he stroked the trigger like the silky edge of a child's blanket. A black duck,
believed to have witnessed the killing, asserts the rabbit, known as a harlequin to most, felt the world no longer laughed at his jests
and, ever the showman, decided to give the people what they seemed to want most.

I included a short biography the last time we used a poem by Indian poet Sudeep Sen. I won't repeat that, but will add something new I just noticed in his credits in the book. In addition to his poetry and his work as an editor, Sen also directed several films and co-directed several others, none of whose titles I recognize.
This poem is from his book of poetry Postmarked India, signed by the poet, according to the salutation to someone named "Ray", during a trip he made to San Antonio in February, 2000. It is a longish poem, in eight parts. According to the title it is selected sections "from" a longer poem, but it appears complete to me, so I don't quite know what to make of it.
Anyway, here it is. There are illustrations of each "frame" of the poem that I wish I could duplicate, but can't. Imagine murals lined in dark pencil.
from Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames - 1994
Prologue
Death has an invisible presence In the Vesuvian valley, even the corpses
bear and insidious resemblance, that belie shifting shadows in the subterranean alley
Death has an invisible presence, so does life, in its incipience and its ends,
linked, like two inverted arches, bent to meet in a circle at their ends.
Strips of zinc, metal coated in wax, bathed in acid, are scratched.
Year's twelve seasons reducted to eight - the image slowly unfolds its fate
in the half-light, under transparent protection of paper, moist and permanent,
etching the once-flowing blood stream, now frozen as rich loam, ribbed lava reams.
1
But the story began long ago: Remember the young couple, together
starting their life, their dream house distilled from that embryo's yoke.
The site chosen, the view determined - Mount Vesuvius - this centerpiece
to be framed by an arched window pane of the bedroom's intimacy, and space.
2
Their house started breathing, piecing itself at night - the slow cementing
of bricks, supports, and the arch. The building traces its curve, its arms
locking tension in place. The spade like a magical brush made
everything circulate, outlining the movements, the inhabiting
of specific spaces, and the furniture's place. In a grand overture
the wooden bed with curved ends was placed right beneath the rails
of the window, overseen by Vesuvius. "Lava God!" they prayed, "Bless us,
our love, and our curse." The union of flesh, blood, smoke and bones.
3
The evening unfolded naturally and quietly, as deceptively
as the view's receding perspective drew them to the mountain peak -
to its air, the snow, its dust and fire. Fire engulfed their bodies, their
fingers, burning nail-tips, furrowing lines of passion on each other's skins.
4
It was freezing. The flames, frozen like tense icicles - hard-edged,
brittle, tentative, chilled, eager. The night brought a strange winter.
That night there was black rain, everywhere - nowhere to escape,
except amongst the synovial spaces of their intertwined limbs, as
their bodies remained locked in fear and in death, around each other.
A marriage made in heaven, and in hell buried unknowingly - skeletal
remains transfixed in the passion of the very first night, unaware of
the world's changed face and the undone terrain,
now completely re-done, different - calcified, stripped, eroded, irreverent -
the bright skies sheltering the ruins, the dark soil protecting the fossils.
Death has an invisible presence in the Vesuvian valley, even the corpses
bear and insidious resemblance, that belie shifting shadows in the subterranean alley.
5
Years later, two grave-diggers (or archeologists, or conservationists, or
restorationists), stumble, quite by chance, upon this ancient site.
searching for something else, following a geological trail -
a chameleon path of buried ash - remains of civilization, now washed.
Work began: digging into the skin of the earth, defacing the soil, its
texture gradually ground further, reducing the grains finer and deeper.
Then liquid was poured, funneling the volcanic shaft, clearing
the debris of the past itself, to unearth the past.
6
Then, a violent tremor, the plates shifted, skies darkened, there was rain,
heavy rain - a rain of redemption, healing the lepered limbs, slowly washing
the bones to the last brittle and grain. Death has an invisible presence
in the Vesuivian valley, even corpses bear peculiar insidious resemblance.
7
Now, people come in great numbers, pay to see the same space -
the house, the room, that bed, the couple mummified as they last slept,
left unmoved, untouched, unaged. Mount Vesuvius still guard their gate
and the view - the outside of the past, and the life, inside.
8
the dead: All neatly packed in small square groups, and
in even multiples of eight, nailed, framed, and glass-encased.
even the new grave-diggers pay, the elderly mountain pays
too - in twos, fours, and eights. Pompeii remains, uncontained
Strips of zinc, metal coated in wax, bated in acid, now re-scratched.
Year's twelve seasons reduced to eight - the image slowly unfolding its fate
in the half-light, under transparent protection of paper, moist and permanent,
etching the flowing blood stream, life frozen, yet unfrozen, rich lava, alive.
Epilogue:
Death has an invisible presence in the Vesuvian valley, even the corpses
bear an insidious resemblance, that belie shifting shadows, in the subterranean alley.
Death has an invisible presence, so does life, in its incipience and its ends,
linked, like two inverted arches, bent to meet in a circle at their ends.

I've been in a kind of remembering and reporting mood for a while and and my poems, like this one and most of the others, reflect that. One of the problems with that is, even though I'd like to be writing some shorter pieces, once I get started remembering, the memories start to jump into the poem on their own.
fulton street hustlers
it's eleven in the morning and you can tell the drinkers, the down- but-not- outers, squinting in the mid- day sun as they cross fulton street, leaving their $40-a-week motel room, heading for breakfast at one of the dozen taco shops in the neigh borhood, chorizo and eggs with a side of refried beans, two flour tortillas black sludge coffee and six aspirin for the head that won't stop aching until they get their first beer, their scrambled eggs chaser that officially starts the day
mostly men, careful with appearances, fresh shined boots, sharp creased jeans and starched long-sleeve cowboy shirts with fake pearl snaps, pool shooters, dart throwers, penny tossers, pinball wizards, and hustlers of most every kind, living on the edge always, on the edge of losing usually, they live on alcohol and beer nuts, cheap meals at flytrap eateries and dark places where the truth is only what you can seen in a smoked bar mirror, where pre- tending is easier than not

August Stramm, born in 1874, was a German poet and playwright, considered one of the first of the expressionists. He also served in the German Army and was killed in action during World War I.
A collection of his poems, titled Dripping Blood, was published after his death in 1919.
These two poems are from the book Music while drowning a collection of German expressionist poems. The books editor makes a point in his introduction of the close relationships between German expressionist writers and painters during the early 20th century and how the work on one side affected the work on the other. The book includes illustrations, which I can't reproduce, unfortunately, that emphasize that symbiosis.
Anyone familiar with my own evolving style will quickly recognize one of the reasons I like Stramm's poems. Here are two of them.
War Instinct
Eye's flash Your look cracks Hot Streams the bleeding over me And Drenches Runnels of sea. You flash and flare. Life forces Flame Mildew deludes And Knits And Knits.
(Translated by Will Stone and Anthony Vivis)
Fallen
Heaven films the eye earth claws the hand air hums weeping and twines women's lamentation in the stranded hair
(Translated by Patrick Bridgewater)

Here's a poem out of rural Virginia by friend and fellow poet, Dave Ruslander. This poem is from his book Voices In My Head.
Your can find out more about Dave's book by clicking on his link on the right.
Black Dog
Amber stalks blow in warmth as the summer sun reels over California hillsides.
Grassroots still live in drought through life has been leached from their blades.
Drunk from autumn rains, they will toss their tassels kissing neighbors
I contemplate cycles - calm, stormy, dark and light, interrupted by a sudden flight into blue: a covey of quails.
The black dog is running through the fields.

Next, a realistically romantic piece from Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy was born in Scotland in 1955 and grew up and was educated in England. In addition to her "grown-up" poems for which she has received many awards, she also equally awarded children's poems.
This poem is from the anthology 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, compiled by Billy Collins.
Valentine
Not a rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love.
Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion. It's fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are ...

There are many kinds of self-abuse. Here's one of them.
And, again, I admit to stealing the title from a country and western ditty from fifteen or twenty years ago. In the song, he's being denied his husbandly privilages. This poem is about self-denial, as well as denial of self.
queen of denial
I saw her yesterday as she got our of her volvo convertible
dark sunglasses long platinum blond hair with a dark roast tan that never saw the sun and must have cost a fortune lips and nails red like fire engine blush and thin high fashion thin another way to say excruciating famine in africa thin
I said hello but she didn't respond smile options botoxed from memory and I imagine the human buried some where within this artifact the pretty little girl with the wide open smile who grew into this gargoyle sacrificed to desperation

Our next poem is from Michael Van Wallenghen, a professor of English at the University of Illinois. The poem is from his third collection, Blue Tango.
The Age of Reason
Once, my father got invited by an almost perfect stranger
a four hundred pound alcoholic who brought the drinks all day
to go really flying sometime sightseeing in his Piper cub
and my father said Perfect! Tomorrow was my birthday
I'd be seven years old, a chip off the old daredevil himself
and we'd love to go flying. We'd even bring a case of beer.
My father weighed two fifty two seventy-five in those days
the beer weighed something the ice, the cooler. I weighed
practically nothing: forty-five maybe fifty pounds at the most -
just enough to make me nervous. Where were the parachutes? Who
was this guy? Then suddenly there we were lumbering
down a bumpy, too short runway and headed for a fence...
Holy Shit! my father shouted and that's it, all we need
by the way of miraculous to lift us in a twinkling
over everything - fence, trees and powerline. What a birthday!
We were really flying now... We were probably high enough
to have another beer in fact, high enough to see Belle Isle
the Waterworks, Packard's and the Chrysler plant.
We could even see our own bug-sized house down there
our own backyard, smaller than a chewed-down thumbnail.
We wondered if my mother was taking down the laundry
and if she'd wave...Lightning trembled in the thunderheads
above Belle Isle. Altitude 2,500; air speed: one twenty
but the fuel gauge I noticed quivered right on empty...
I'd reached the age of reason. Our pilot lit a big cigar.

Now, the next installment of the anti- Vietnam War poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last by Robert Bly. Some might question why I continue to post sections of this poem, while, with each posting, mentioning the reservations I have about it.
I continue to use it because, despite my reservations about the poet, the poem is brilliant. And, each time I post it, I think more about my reservations and come closer to understanding them. It is the coldness I sense in the poem that continues to bother me, and the impression I get that Bly, however brilliantly he might write of the pain and blood of war, never actually knew anyone who died in this or any other war. Plus, a real, if possibly unfair, feeling that the Vietnamese deaths weigh on him more than the American dead. It seems a white hat/black hat affair to him, a simplistic approach that can't see or understand the tragedy in the gray.
Anyway, here's the third section of the poem, abused by me again, as usual.
The Teeth Mother Naked At Last
III This is what it's like for a rich country to make war. This is what it's like to bomb huts (afterwards described as "structures"). This is what it's like to kill marginal farmers (afterwards described as "Communists").
This is what it's like to see the altimeter needle going mad:
Baron 25, this is 81. Are there any friendlies in the area? 81 from 25, negative on the friendlies. I'd like you to take out as many structures as possible located in those trees within 200 meters east and west of my smoke mark.
diving, the green earth swinging, cheeks hanging back, red pins blossoming ahead of us, 20-millimeter cannon fire, leveling off, rice fields shooting by like telephone poles, smoke rising, hut roofs loom up huge as landing fields, slugs going in, half the huts on fire, small figures running, palm trees burning, shooting past, up again ...blue sky...cloud mountains...
This is what it's like to have a gross national product.
This is what it's like to send firebombs down from air- conditioned cockpits. This is what it's like to fire into a reed hut with an automatic weapon.
When St. Francis renounced his father's goods, when he threw his clothes on the court floor, then the ability to kiss the poor leapt up from the floor to his lips. We claim our father's clothes, and pick up other people's, finally we have three or four layers of clothes. Then all at once it is fated, we cannot help ourselves, we fire into a reed hut with an automatic weapon.
It's because the aluminum window-shade business is doing well in the United States that we spread fire over entire villages. It's because the trains coming into New Jersey hit the right switches every day that Vietnamese me are cut in two by bullets that follow each other like freight trains. It's because the average hospital bed now costs two hundred dollars a day that we bomb the hospitals in the north.
It is because we have so few women sobbing in back rooms, because we have so few children's heads torn apart by high velocity bullets, because we have so few tears falling on our own hands, that the Super Sabre turns and screams down toward the earth.

You pick up the newspaper and the headline today is the same as the headline yesterday and the day before and days before for five years and you realize there will be no meaningful accountability for the stupidity and stubbornness that is the travesty producing the headlines. The idea that the people causing this will never face any judgment except for the one you haven't believed in in years is enraging.
the list
this is what I know
he is a child of new york not yet of an age to vote barely of an age to shave dead in that foreign bloody place from the blast of a road side bomb
this is what I believe
his name is seared on a list that will be read when the day of accounting comes for those who wasted his life and for the first time in my life I truely do hope there is a hell

Here's another piece from Dale McLain. She joined us last week for the first time with a great poem. She posted this poem yesterday on the Wild Poetry Forum and it was so good and so on with other pieces I was using, I decided to ignore my cooling off rule and bring her back, for the second week in a row.
Here's the poem.
deferred
There were always the parlor tricks, a card drawn from a powdered bosom, the drinking glass crushed in your bare hand, no blood or water, but an orange swallowtail emerging from the shards.
I would lean against a quaintly peeling column on the south end of the porch, nurse my scotch and watch you charm the ladies. The flowers bloomed to compliment your eyes. That summer we forgot the war
though Jimmy and Oswald were missing and Luther's grave was still mounded and raw. You joked about your asthma, feigned so weak a breath you could not sigh over Ella's copper curls or Caroline's perfect, beribboned waist.
You were an emperor in linen slacks, a deity with boyish hair and spotless hands. I worshipped you like all the rest. In my cups, I allowed myself to sweeten the memory of your kiss with a rich honey
of dreamed devotion. You belonged to all of us, accepted our preening like a sparrow, tamed and clipped. Did I love you best or only truthfully? The tremble in your hands took my breath.
Because I stood apart, that prodigal summer, you chose me to find you hanging like a lone pennant in the boathouse. I took this for love

And Alice Folkart is back this week to. I so like her work, I always want to use everything she does.
Spent Rain
Awake when I should be asleep sleep walking? sleep waking? sleep writing?
I sit in the light, surrounded by darkness, deep, black, sounded with cackling, chuckling, a bird? An animal hunting, scrabbling through the leaves?
I step outside into the hot night. No stars, no wind, just drip, drip, drip the hollow sound of spent rain off the eaves.
Sounds as tired as I am.

The Classical Tamil Anthologies refers to a body of classical literature created the Tamil people, a subgroup in India with a 2000 year recorded history, between the years 200 BCE and 300 CE. The anthologies include 2381 poems written by some 473 known and anonymous poets, both men and women, from various professions and classes of society. The poems fell out of popular memory beginning about 1000 CE. then were rediscovered the 19th century by scholars such as S. V. Damodaram Pillai and U. V. Swaminatha Iyer.
Here are examples of the works in the Anthologies. All are translated by A.K. Ramanujan.
The first poem is by Mamalatan a poet of the classical Tamil period. I was able to find several reference to him/her on the web, as well as references to this particular poem, but no biographical information.
What She Said
Don't they really have in the land where he has gone
such things as house sparrows
dense-feathered, the color of fading water lilies, pecking at grain drying on yards, playing with the scatter of the fine dust of the streets' manure and living with their nestlings in the angles of the penthouse
and miserable evenings,
and loneliness?
The next poem is by Maturaikkataiayattar Makan Vennakan. I could find nothing about him/her on the web.
What She Said To Her Girl-Friend
Once, you said let's go, let's go to the gay carnival in the big city:
that day the good elders spoke of many good omens for our going. But he waylaid me, gave me a slingshot and rattles for scaring parrots, and a skirt of young leaves which he said looked good on me.
and with his lies he took the rare innocence that mother had saved for me
And now I am like this.
Now, a poem by Maturai Eruttlan Centamputan. Again, I could find references to his work, but no bio. Somebody who knows something about classical Tamil poets ought to get to work with Wikipedia on this.
What She Said
Before I laughed with him nightly
the slow waves beating on his wide shores and the palmyra bringing forth heron-like flowers near the waters,
my eyes were like the lotus my arms had the grace of the bamboo my forehead was mistaken for the moon
but now
Kannan, our next poet, is recognized for his/her place as a poet of the classical Tamil era, but no more detail of his life could be found.
What Her Girl-Friend Said To Him
Sir, not that we did not hear the noise you made trying to open the bolted doors, a robust bull elephant stirring in the night of everyone's sleep; we did. But as we fluttered inside like a peacock in the net, crest broken, tail feathers flying,
our good mother held us close in her innocence thinking to quell our fears.
And a last one by Kollan Arici. Again, though he seems to be an important person in world literature, the web seems to know nothing of him.
What Her Friend Said
The great city fell asleep but we did not sleep. Clearly we heard, all night, from the hillock next to our house the tender branches of the flower-crusted tree with laves like peacock feet let fall their blue-sapphire flowers.

Here's another of those remembering things.
2 am to 2 pm
there was a time when I drove a yellow cab in a small city in south texas
barely 21 and just a couple of months of legal age for the job, I drove 2 pm to 2 am, 7 days a week and on a good week might have made $30 which was crap for money even for south texas in 1965
I made the airport runs, took little old ladies to the supermarket in the afternoon, picked up the whores when the sun went down for a trip across town to a couple of the motels that specialized in assuring cotton buyers had interesting company in the evening when they came in from the fields hot, hungry and horny, and, of course, between whores, the semi-drunks on their way to total blackout smash- dom at any one of the five hundred cantinas on the south side, knowing I'd see them again at 1 am when the bar's closed
I hated that last hour, the hour of the drunks, smelling them passed out in my back seat, watching couples in my rear view mirror either in a state of semi-fuck or punching each other out, hauling the old shrimper who came home every three months with a pocketful of money that he usually got beaten out of him in some dark bar or another, getting into my cab all beat to shit, drunk, struggling to come up with the 75 cents he needed to get home to his mother, a ninety year old crone he cursed from the time he got into the cab until he got home, stumbling to his front door, and I'll not forget the guy with the knife, drunk enough to think he could mug me, so drunk he dropped his knife and while he was crawling around the back seat looking for it I was able to pull over and toss him out on the street, spitting and cussing at me in spanish and some other language foreign to me and maybe to him as well
I hated the job, but I was driving an old '49 chevy fastback junker and it was nice to drive around in a new taxicab all day and as for the lousy pay, if I had been willing to work a lot harder I could have made more money picking cotton, but I did that once never wanted to do it again so I figured the whores and drunks and little old ladies were a better deal overall, as long as they left their knives at home

We're going on two more little trips with Blaise Cendrars, then let him rest up some. But there is still, in weeks ahead, a whole world to discover with Blaise.
For now, though, there's this.
VII. City of Frisco
It's an old hulk eaten away by rust Twenty times in dry dock and engine makes only 7 or 8 knots And to economize they burn old half-used cinders and cast-off coal They hoist some makeshift sails every time there's a puff of wind
With his scarlet face his bushy eyebrows his pimply nose Captain Hopkins is a real sailor Little silver rings pierce his ears This ship is loaded exclusively with the caskets of Chinese who died in America but who wanted to be buried in their native land Oblong boxes red or light blue or covered with golden inscriptions Now that's a type of merchandise illegal to transport
VIII. Vancouver
In the thick fog that packs the boats and docks you can barely hear the bell ringing ten o'clock The docks are deserted and the town is fast asleep You walk along the low and sandy coast where a glacial wind is blowing and the long Pacific waves are breaking The pale spot in the murky shadows is the station for the Canadian Northern the Grand Trunk And those bluish halos in the wind are steamers bound for the Klondike Japan and the East Indies It's so dark I can barely make out the street sign as I lug my suitcase around looking for a cheap hotel
Everyone has embarked The oarsmen are bent over the oars and the heavy boat loaded to the gunwales pushes into the high waves From time to time a little hunchback at the tiller changes their course Steering his way through the mist guided by a foghorn They bump against the dark mass of the ship and Siberian huskies rise on the starboard quarter Washed out in the gray-white-yellow As they were loading fog

Often, in my opinion, life is much simpler if you just accept that what is is what is and what is gonna be.
good idea, I'll start next tuesday
I'm old and I'm fat with a belly like a beach ball got blown up inside and hope someday to be older and thinner but will settle for older with beach ball intact if that's the price to pay and all good resolutions aside I think it might be the best I'll ever do anyway given my knack for denial is near extinct

That's it for this week. Time to grab the old ride and book it.
|
Allen,
Great looking site, and I love the variety of materials you post here. I'd like to find out more about Blaise Cendrars. Is there a book you would recommend?
Jim
Post a Comment