The Expansive Howl (Part I)
(I'm serializing a tribute to my most influential poet. That is to say, I'm going to have expanding vignettes drawn from his lines and copied and extended in my comparatively poor, frail prose.)
The negro streets at dawn…
They rise early to the blast of steamwhistles. They cross the creeks and swamps, balancing on utility posts that have long been bent into the muck below. It’s not just negroes: that would be exaggeration. It’s all the people labeled coloured and colourful: organ grinders straight out of a French cul-de-sac and your occasional avant-garde Spaniard. They import their architecture into the streets: utility poles become billboards and billboards become communal draw spaces, ripe for religious revivals and fundamentalists to harangue crowds from on high. Intersections will do as circles for drumming beats that echo, fall and bounce down the phylogenies, back-propagating along the threads of sinew and bone, sperm and ova down to those two dozen hominids in Tanzania hiding in the forests, holding the entire future of the human world in their every tiny action. There was the Australopithecine gathering, all humanity-to-be assembled, every early Othello and Caracalla and Gibbon and Hammurabi and Buddha, but also Epicurus and Caligula and Confucius and Xerxes and Eli, in the trees shadows of Yetis and El Chupacabras and Virgin Marys always pointing to Abomination: St. Alia of the Knife was still unborn. They hugged more. And here they hug again. Except when working in the Associated Auto Parts Factory &c., ancient peeling sign from the very dawn of the greatest flesh-and-blood-and-machinery upheaval to overcome the sucking insect foulness of these swamps. The great hot potato of the industrial revolution: suddenly hugging instincts turned to lathe-turning and natural intelligence of the beats of drum circles turned to stormy indignations of union rallies, suddenly jewelry melted down for the buckles of overalls. Seasides bullied out by the grates of storm sewers, idylls turned to the horror of steel and iron, ages of humanity spelled out on the stairs of walk-ups. Dirty sixth floors from which I watch all this, light snow falling, reminder of lightly moving fickle creativity of nature elements set against the plodding trudging of snow-hills and traffic slowed to a crawl. Massive mad haze of stress hormones and sirens and ambulances and street hawkers and mazurkas of old Europa and banjos of the porches of the South and my own guitar, three weeks out of tune and lonesome for my fingerpicking. I’ve fallen into the habit of watching the sunrise, being lucky the spot of the sunrise is not obscured by high-rises. Therese and I throw snowballs at each other as our breath condenses, and my affection condenses and I want nothing more than to get inside after the brilliant yellow glare and trade flesh for flesh as comfort, leaning on the handrails of the staircase and happy to be inside where the wind doesn’t overcome and impose itself to everything. There are joys in walking down six flights and greeting the rising factory workers, chat of sports and poker both last night’s and tomorrow’s, of new organizing rallies (banner being knit in right behind the door, Ezra’s wife lugging two large paint cans and countless brushes). Sights of falling by the wayside men across the street—fixing on street corners and congregations of the youngest ones—solid tufts of anger without direction. Ezra tells me the mood is turning ugly. “Just you wait a couple years.” We hug the man and we know none of us will be targets. We’ve got over-thin, frail, over-exposed roots here among peeling billboards and staircases with smells of cooking at all hours, and the sounds of music at all hours, and the sound of vicious voices at all hours, and creaking pipes and car engines and generators, and also giggling of children’s games or more mature cooing of adolescent games and yes, the moaning of adolescent games in utility closets and behind the rows and rows of clotheslines. Therese and I add to the symphony in our own myriad ways before work and after work. Because it is time for me to cross the same crashed utility poles of the half-frozen swamp and turn my lathes, and talk to Ezra and others, and break up the fights and vicious bigots. Their meat will be spent on these lathes, whereas ours will belong to the stairwell: both grimy, yes, but only one echoes with remembrances of what it was like before the robot skullfaces dug up the Earth and put us in thrall, bound by outflow pipes and guy wires.
Consider: "The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche."
The negro streets at dawn…
They rise early to the blast of steamwhistles. They cross the creeks and swamps, balancing on utility posts that have long been bent into the muck below. It’s not just negroes: that would be exaggeration. It’s all the people labeled coloured and colourful: organ grinders straight out of a French cul-de-sac and your occasional avant-garde Spaniard. They import their architecture into the streets: utility poles become billboards and billboards become communal draw spaces, ripe for religious revivals and fundamentalists to harangue crowds from on high. Intersections will do as circles for drumming beats that echo, fall and bounce down the phylogenies, back-propagating along the threads of sinew and bone, sperm and ova down to those two dozen hominids in Tanzania hiding in the forests, holding the entire future of the human world in their every tiny action. There was the Australopithecine gathering, all humanity-to-be assembled, every early Othello and Caracalla and Gibbon and Hammurabi and Buddha, but also Epicurus and Caligula and Confucius and Xerxes and Eli, in the trees shadows of Yetis and El Chupacabras and Virgin Marys always pointing to Abomination: St. Alia of the Knife was still unborn. They hugged more. And here they hug again. Except when working in the Associated Auto Parts Factory &c., ancient peeling sign from the very dawn of the greatest flesh-and-blood-and-machinery upheaval to overcome the sucking insect foulness of these swamps. The great hot potato of the industrial revolution: suddenly hugging instincts turned to lathe-turning and natural intelligence of the beats of drum circles turned to stormy indignations of union rallies, suddenly jewelry melted down for the buckles of overalls. Seasides bullied out by the grates of storm sewers, idylls turned to the horror of steel and iron, ages of humanity spelled out on the stairs of walk-ups. Dirty sixth floors from which I watch all this, light snow falling, reminder of lightly moving fickle creativity of nature elements set against the plodding trudging of snow-hills and traffic slowed to a crawl. Massive mad haze of stress hormones and sirens and ambulances and street hawkers and mazurkas of old Europa and banjos of the porches of the South and my own guitar, three weeks out of tune and lonesome for my fingerpicking. I’ve fallen into the habit of watching the sunrise, being lucky the spot of the sunrise is not obscured by high-rises. Therese and I throw snowballs at each other as our breath condenses, and my affection condenses and I want nothing more than to get inside after the brilliant yellow glare and trade flesh for flesh as comfort, leaning on the handrails of the staircase and happy to be inside where the wind doesn’t overcome and impose itself to everything. There are joys in walking down six flights and greeting the rising factory workers, chat of sports and poker both last night’s and tomorrow’s, of new organizing rallies (banner being knit in right behind the door, Ezra’s wife lugging two large paint cans and countless brushes). Sights of falling by the wayside men across the street—fixing on street corners and congregations of the youngest ones—solid tufts of anger without direction. Ezra tells me the mood is turning ugly. “Just you wait a couple years.” We hug the man and we know none of us will be targets. We’ve got over-thin, frail, over-exposed roots here among peeling billboards and staircases with smells of cooking at all hours, and the sounds of music at all hours, and the sound of vicious voices at all hours, and creaking pipes and car engines and generators, and also giggling of children’s games or more mature cooing of adolescent games and yes, the moaning of adolescent games in utility closets and behind the rows and rows of clotheslines. Therese and I add to the symphony in our own myriad ways before work and after work. Because it is time for me to cross the same crashed utility poles of the half-frozen swamp and turn my lathes, and talk to Ezra and others, and break up the fights and vicious bigots. Their meat will be spent on these lathes, whereas ours will belong to the stairwell: both grimy, yes, but only one echoes with remembrances of what it was like before the robot skullfaces dug up the Earth and put us in thrall, bound by outflow pipes and guy wires.
Consider: "The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche."
posted by A. D. at 5:40 PM
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