Abandoned truck: photo by Adam Knowles, 14 October 2005
It hasn't worked from its mechanical infancy really
I once met an Indian, who said
Apropos my broken down pickup truck
When an Indian's pickup truck breaks down
He just leaves it in the bushes beside the road
And walks away, less
Trouble that way in the long run
Because anyhow that hunk of grief was never worth fifty dollars
13 comments:
Yes yes. The teaching/talking stays ...
that hunk of grief
What a great way to talk abt grief.
There is a Devendra Banhart song Cripple Crow where in comes -
Crippled crow, say something for grieving.
I v much dig it.
Perfect time of year for this photo (I mean when it was taken) - there is an almost organic connection as the old hunk fades back into minerals and soil ... the poem takes up this thread and weaves it carefully all together.
Another connection of connections.
Don
I love "that hunk of grief"
and have owned a few in my time.
I am often amazed by how far into the wilderness one can find hunks of grief . . . and not always the wheeled kinds.
Nin,
The vehicle at issue here was a 54 Chevy pickup, powder blue, which I had bought (and the price also included a rusty box of tools) for $50, drove on mostly unpaved country roads for the better part of a year, occasionally ventured over hill and dale to civilization with (always perilous, at best, not to go into the details), and, when it died a natural/unnatural death, left parked immobile on the dirt road out front until somebody got up the gumption (a kindness, to me) to come along and drive it off, no questions asked.
A few years later, in the Front Range of the Rockies, we were stuck for a winter up near timberline, in a zone full of spooky abandoned mineshafts and abandoned vehicles littering the scrub pine wilderness. Guys in webhats with newer model pickup trucks (loaded rifle racks) drove up after Broncos games to drink Coors and shoot up the older abandoned pickup trucks.
I'm not sure whether in pickup truck depth psychology that would be patricide, matricide, or fratricide.
Aditya,
Well, grief comes in the large economy size, for machines, too sometimes, one supposes; yet always for a limited time only.
(Can there be a tragic romance in or of junk?)
Don,
Maybe everything gets to be compost when it's ripe enough.
THAT
looks like my 1954 5-windo Dodge pick-up !
AND
I paid $50 for it
used it on that Hanover Pennsylvania farm (see Restoration Poems, Country Valley Press)
for a bit more than 2 years.
then
drove it down to D. C. and sold it (as was) for $125 !
sh'd 've kept it !
I wonder if the tree will grow into it (or, in a sense vice versa). There's an old fence in my town that an even older tree has grown through so that part of the fence is now embedded into the tree trunk in a way that seems impossibly original and any sculptor would envy. I've seen tricycles and other objects imbedded in tree trunks that grew through or around them as well. It's nice to see Mother Nature triumph still despite our overruning her with our detritus.
The poem and the photo complement each other perfectly; is it just my imagination or has some resourceful individual—a mechanic?—lightened the junk pile somewhat by removing the clunker’s engine?
They say space junk might one day become ubiquitous.
This post seems to have (happily!) become a small junk magnet.
Great comments... and even greater, one comment that Blogger (that ingrate) refused to process has now morphed into yet more junkyard entertainment for us all:
John Tranter: Hulk
Nothing is more romantic than a rusty pickup truck being claimed by the wild.
Indians are smart.
I miss the word verifications, partly.
White people are clever-stupid.
Unbeknownst to their loyal, unquestioning servants (that is, us), the Blogger lab pixies have been tinkering in the toy shop with the word verification game.
For a month or two there, they tried playing "Guess the rules".
How tiresome.
Now they have come up with a new, more complicated, even more tiresome system involving various forms of mutated scripts, dates, multiple characters, etc.
The sole result of this seems to be a new, extra degree of difficulty for legit commenters.
Spam of course has no brain, so finds it easy to circumvent all such mechanical obstacles.
If you can't think, you're already ahead in this game.
(Now if they would just get Indian-smart and leave the WV gizmo out in the woods to rust, rot and return to Nature... )
What a great poem! And what a sad fate for a pick-up to be broken-down. All he wanted to do is pick-up and not let anyone-down.
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