.
The ice cream truck is coming... or is it? (Jeddah): photo by Hany Soliman, 7 January 2010
Your new Schwan's rural ice cream delivery driver
is sullen-lost. Or, a few tires blown on scab rock
where U-turns are impossible, your driver is slurping
a tub of French vanilla, cursing his wife for knowing
a fat man at a small town instant-cash strip-mall store.
Red Shuttleworth: Summer Chronograph: 68, from Poet Red Shuttleworth, 24 August 2013
Too hot for ice cream. Mojave Heights, Victorville, California: photo by Jen Montgomery (Jen_Mo), 23 July 2006
Untitled: photo by Wes Booden, 25 February 2010
Tree of Life -- Kingdom of Bahrain: photo by Two Crabs, 28 October 2011
13 comments:
Red Shuttleworth's Summer Chromatograph series has to be one of the great poetic reckonings ever accorded the American West.
The whole sequence, with Red's beautiful minimal colour views as proper and perfect setting, can be found here.
I've been hoping to splice out a bit to share in this space but didn't want to take a chance on breaking Red's run of luck -- and nerve, and daily discipline, and close attention to his landscapes -- until the sun dropped down for the last time on this long hot summer. But that's now happened. So while there's still one eye left to form a blur with... watching the shadows settle into the sage in the company of one very fine poet.
Thank you for this kindness!
Ever best wishes,
Red
Every line delicious: measured in the best sense; bright bursts of rhyme.
Bristled clusters like "...small town instant-cash strip-mall store" make for a good dose of worldly astringency.
A truth-aligned pleasure.
Another kind of haze to the last post in Mr Shuttleworth's photos.
All sort of hazing available here, pick your poison.
Very glad you've looked at Red's sequence, Duncan, I did think you might enjoy it. I've been tuning in appreciatively all summer.
So much to like here: a hard dose of laconic honesty backed up by a tender shot of heartfulness, a steady sidelong gaze that never misses the comical aspects of the situation (the human situation that is), all made to go down easy by a winsome craft sense (those staccato stresses stretching out that great last line reminding us that after all it's a stress-based history that still informs our poetry in this language)...
Red's form is probably perfect for me to try with 50 years of memory stream, thousands of photographs. Thanks Tom. Thanks Red. Where are those A-Frames? I lived in one. There were young women everywhere tanning their bodies.
Sure is a long way from Poland
Harris
Thanks, Harris.
Maybe the Sands of Time have drifted over those A-Frames... and someone has painted them with red nail polish.
Or maybe that's just the blood in my eye.
Maybe that's just the way things are... in Poland.
(It's getting late.)
A voice in my dream revealed to me that those A-Frame houses were all painted with a new style of nail lacquer named Corrosive. You’re correct Tom. It is red, and what's more, is believed to be indestructible, as are the synthetic sands of time under which those A-Frame Houses and other artifacts of our history are now buried. The substances were designed by a consortium of Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin-Marietta, and Boeing, with financing from Barclays, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America using funds that disappeared in the "now-you-see-it, now you don't" CDO-Swap derivatives boondoggle of 2007-2008. It is hoped that the synthetic, silicon based sands of time are radiation-proof and will provide raw material for the creation of flexible building blocks, bricks and tubes for the construction of “safe as milk” homes for super-rich corporate greedheads to breed in after the Fukushima melt-down completes its slow burn through to the other side of the earth, the group said today through an unnamed source speaking upon conditions of anonymity due to National Security concerns, So there is good news after all, Tom. Although money can’t buy love, it may be able to provide a kind of technological immortality for select gene-pools.
Happy Labor Day
Love,
Harris
After taking in and thoroughly digesting Red's cool offerings, I can only say SLURP!--give us more!
At the Strip Mall beneath the Tree of Life it's all non-dairy, all the time. Cool? Why else would everyone be stripping if not to be cool? Just ask that guy in the tree. And should he summon the courage to venture down, would it be because Al Funtas Ice Cream has promised free samples on infidel holidays? And second helpings, you ask? Sí, por supuesto!
As the holiday gets underway, Al and his #1 associate, aboard the Sweeties Bus, confer on the worried issue of what to do about the Sno-Cones to ensure maximum freshness. To deep freeze or not to deep freeze?
(By the way, should any lingering microscopic health concerns remain, huddled like tiny frightened milli-sieverts beneath those colourful little daiquiri-umbrella thingies mounted atop Al's Sno-Cones -- no worries, Al's whole Rolling Coolness outfit was purchased at a brilliant bargain price from overstock at the Convenience Shop at Tepco's #2 Reactor -- guaranteed safe even in the event of a meltdown!)
Thank you for opening this book for me. It's quite amazing and my next move will be sharing it some friends who I'm fairly sure will be as bowled over as I was. Curtis
Thanks very much, Curtis.
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