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The Williamsburg Bridge and the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn: photo by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012
My back being to the window
where I might have once found
salutations, I find salvage
is an odd job among
odd jobs I'm predisposed to
divulge the inner-workings:
....the fewer the questions, the less the task
....steal dear, sell cheap
....planned obsolescence is a fact of modern manufacturing
....clean copper commands a good price
I have absorbed the lessons, the costs,
and what little in the way of wages
with a determination bordering on fixation
through the Cloud City corridors
Fireworks for Memorial Day over Asbury Park oceanfront: photo by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012
A cop pulling a car off the FDR Drive in Manhattan: photo by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012
14 comments:
Great poem.
Especially the 'through the Cloud City corridors'.
Thanks for sharing our view of this one, Jonathan.
Will's a cool artist as well as poet. Here's a visit to his studio.
David Shankbone is my favourite contemporary photographer of New York City.
(By the by friends, speaking of also cool, check out Jonathan's blog Gardening Leave sometime -- see marginal link list here, right under, of course, Other Stuff Annexe.)
These pictures of ordinary reality—both the poem and the photographs—are raw and powerful documents of the everyday. The ordinary keeps changing. Reality in all its guises remains a trickster. I have to remind myself to stay alert.
What's really frightening, Hazen, is that sometimes even staying alert isn't good enough. One can be struck from the rear.
Every side can become the blind side.
Tom, thank you very much for your kind words. And the chance to visit the studio...
Domino, Cloud City, Salvage, Shankbone--all sugary sweet melting images in industry and twisted/straightened metal in our petroleum world.
Tom,
My back being to the window
where I might once have found
salutations . . .
with a determination bordering on fixation
through the Cloud City corridors
Great photos together with the poem, those first lines so Wyatt-like (the last ones too).
5.30
grey whiteness of fog against invisible
ridge, red tailed hawk calling in right
foreground, no sound of wave in channel
methods compared to subject,
what in this position
one will remember, who then
was passing, evidence
wingspan of osprey lifting from channel,
fog on horizon to the left of the point
Our pleasure, Jonathan.
Susan,
I'll have that in the diesel, with an extra shovelful of powdered sugar and a sprinkling of those tasty little metallic flakes on top, please.
Oh yes, and I have a lot of blind sides, but it's hard not to be struck, first in a good way by poems like this one, and second in the bad way, just by a drive-by glance at the news. I find myself shouting at the radio sometimes, Don't tell me that again!
And that's about as effective I think I can be most of the time.
Ah well.
Will that be for here or to go? Do you have your rewards card handy? No, sorry, we don't have a teacher's discount here but thanks for asking.
Nice osprey, Steve. And swell red tailed hawk as well. The thoughts are lifted.
Here this morning a pair of defiant crows high up in the overgrowth (the scandal of the neighborhood!) -- loudly busy for an hour after dawn, making strident music against the fog and unceasing killer rush hour traffic.
A determination bordering on fixation is sometimes the only way through the corridors of cloud.
The "harsh metres" of Wyatt sometimes have a use.
Will's Latinate vocabulary of the scrabbled urbs brings back the audited gravity of all those syllables -- we must bear that weight of language like all the properties of the past upon our backs -- thinking of the time-burden symbols in Mayan glyphs.
Nin, last night the batteries were dead on my tiny walkabout radio, so I just unplugged the one earplug that goes to my one ear not severed, and the BBC World Bad News had to go on without my notice.
The darkness surrounds us, and what can we do about it, I said to my friend.
one will remember, who then
was passing
Susan, I'll have it to go, I think, though I don't know where.
I think the better teachers don't know they are teaching when they are, and are always discounted.
My rewards card, is that the plastic thing with the tire tracks all over it?
Well, yes it is. Just look for our logo! That way, you'll have it ready next time!
Will do.
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