RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,017
(peanut butter zabadee)
Remember I said I wanted to
write abstract. I never did get
to that point, and, ouside of
John Ashbery, say, it's not
much been well-done at all.
I've seen others cower beneath
it, as automatic writing or
stream of consciousness or
imagism or whatever it gets
called along the way. A writer
can't really have a seance with
a pen (or a keyboard) and call
it literature, but many have
tried that too. I turned out for
me to just be about seeing -
training your eyes to see a
bit differently. Altering the
angle just a little makes a
lot of change; and that change
is what one then feeds off.
Raw material! For free!
-
Bit o' Honey goes a long, long
way. If you have one head it
lasts all day. Rocket-machine
science at the old water-well
bucket. Five hundred years
of Science and what did it
give us? The moon, and the
hand-held, TV Remote. Once
upon a time there was an
engineer. Choo Choo Charlie
was his name we hear.......
-
My regular practice is as a
baseball strategist. I'm not a real
doctor though I play one on TV.
My interchangeable lives are as
as meaningless as can be. I'll
not need to buy another book
for as long as I live. If I read
all that's here, I can live to a
hundred. I'll probably run out if
money before I exhaust my ideas.
My perfect abstract approach is
to go east to the water, the old
boats of Perth Amboy, and Hazlet,
and Keyport too. I've been to the
city, and I've gone to the zoo.
Everything's the same to me now.
-
One time, I was maybe 7, my
father took me somewhere, across
the bridge, to watch the oil-fields
burning. That's what it seemed like
anyway - across the water in
Staten Island, a few tanks were
on fire, the ground was scorched,
and the flames were rising as people
like us stood around watching.
Spectators of fire, from a safe
distance. I was unable to understand
what I was seeing, not able to do
the math or add things up. The fire
was intense, and I could feel it in
waves, as the heat was sweeping
by. A few people had parked on
the field, and the older, rounded
cars, backlit by red and yellow in
the dusky night, seemed spectral
and haunting and strange. There
was a certain hiss in the air as well.
In the same way that I used to
imagine riding in my father's car
with a huge cleaver, or blade, out
the window, chopping everything
down as we passed, one great
knife-swath over the land, I here
also imagined what would occur
if, at once, everything just took
up in flames. Could the whole
world burn out?
-
Back in these days I'm talking
of, it was still possible, for whatever
reason, polio or something to see
kids in leg-braces, crutches, etc.
They would trundle around, with
all these brackets of metal on their
legs. It's something never seen now,
in the same way all those pictures
we used to see of children in what
were called 'iron lungs' desperately
getting help with their breathing.
More like transparent coffins with
clear, rounded tops and tubes coming
out, I thought. Whatever the reason
for all that was, I guess it too has
disappeared. Times change. We have
new, and different, problems now?
Anyway, watching this fire, we were
under some sort of open roof, a
parkland enclosure, and there was
a water fountain; one of those old
kind with but the barest dribble of
water. They used to tell us not to
put our mouths on the spout, for
water - kids did that often, just
sucking for water at the poor-flow
fountains. Anyway, one of those
kids in braces slowly worked his
way over towards us, near the
fountain. He was having real
slow and deliberate trouble trying
to reach, and situate himself, with
the crutches and the braces. My
father suddenly, and quite simply,
went over to him, swept him up,
lifted him right to the fountain's
mouthpiece, and the got his drink
of water. They too were backlit,
the red hue was flaming, orange,
yellow, red. It reminded me of that
photo we kept seeing, in school,
of those Iwo Jima guys struggling
to hold up a flag and pole on some
weird wartime island.
-
The kid was real happy, thanked
my father a lot, and they went on
a bit about the excitement of the
fire. I realized too, he was older
than I at first thought. His features
were mature, solid and blunt. Like
older people get when they grow
into their final shape and form.
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