RED LGHTS OF THE TALL GRAY BRIDGE

294. RED LIGHTS OF THE TALL GRAY BRIDGE (1997):

Then it is as if everything happened all at once - 252 E. Clinton Avenue the big stone house the rolling yard covered with plantings and the old concrete statuary and the advancing night coming up from Fort Lee and the high rises on the cliffs and the taint of a town that wishes to still be but a village and cannot any longer be so and the CNBC Building with its big giant letters once at 2000 Fletcher Avenue and the pillioned iron struts of the gigantic vacant busted but running still George Washington Bridge and the grassy advances to it on either side and the pin-heads of those walking the vast great span stretching between natural rocks and man-made rocks on the other side and the cars rolling freely boiled it seems in their own oil and dirtied by the air and dirtying the air at the same time and the whiz roar and hum of traffic and blare of horns growing louder at the toll booth quiescent in its slumbers the addled lines of the numbered and nervous waiting to buy lined up with cash and change to flow the theatergoers and crossers to New York anxious to dine anxious to meet their reservation seating zipping drinking dancing holding lovers hands to heart in the car-seats bursting strapped with companions and dates and friends and lovers and partners and couples and everywhere it seems people moving intent to move and the awesome fearsome lines and lights of the great city laid out before us invites us to walk on and peer through the woods and at the glens and rocks of the old fort and the revolutionary war lookouts and peerages and even the lighthouse far down below and under the bridge on the farther other side as all the lights come up and the outlines of the dizzying buildings change for us and the rows and hedges and caverns and bars and restaurants of old Fort Lee breakaway from time and its reality now the dusted fields cobbled and broken with rocks and waste the 7-11 the diner the Hiram's and Callahan's of the heart the finely attired oriental waiters waiting between things and tables white with linen on their arms and scones and pastries ready for the tea and the tasting and the wholesome sound of cash resounding between every hill and rock and canyon on both sides of the Hudson which flows and tinkling peal of laughter and coin and cash and those who've got it amidst those who haven't and they squander what they will as it turns to food and vintage wine and goods too precious to describe yet go on go on and the bridge rails seem to support the whole entire world as they rise high above and the pinpoint prick of the roadway becomes but a dot in the distance and the high school and the funeral home and the gas station and the kosher deli everything seems to sit and squabble at the rubble'd lane where used cars are sold and others rented and the buses tumble from above as people walk every nation every color represented like some stupid juice of the world dripping on and on and the road where it splits offers two vistas and more and 9W the highway paces north and the palisades tremble and we are off just like that ! departed northward and Alpine and Tenafly and Cresskill and Closter tumble haphazard by with no order except the order of signs and places and trains and shacks and weeds and woods and the rock house still sits and from its yard I look up and watch the patterned all returning planes and jets and airbuses and turbine'd engines rock and tilt the nighttime sky going and coming somewhere from to the citadel of Newark the airport of shackles and God beckons I guess the light within the sky and the great jets carom and turn aloft and below the grounded lights of buildings and cargo and trucks and homes sit still and shine and all the upward stars are dissolved by human light and almost nothing else is seen and the great rock house sits with its broken deer concrete statues warily eyeing the road and great-neck geese in concrete sit atop each ledge and planters and shrubs resound and the squared-off room behind filled with plants and greenery a cactus of the heart like a distant-landed-Arizona forgotten but between lives and in silences recalled and the rolling land the hillside the yard everything comes together at once some fiery hallucinatory conclusion made too fast and in haste so it goes on and I sit on the porch behind the vastness of the stone house and I read in its brick and stone and wood the 70 year old story of all its time and place how it got here and how it was built and who lived here and how they grew out and left here and who replaced them and the photos and the mementos and the interior landscape eerie air the rooms rich with old time and memory the slow crawl of all we live inside each place the very paper on the walls to speak and willing relates itself to me still I sit and watch as the whole globe world turns and changes around me I feel as if new never here before with the wind and the trees around me I witness at one with all things and my mind own mind rushes back itself to other places and like homes I've walked the ruination chorus of destruction where windows are fallen and boarded and rooms and stairways are broken and blasted to death and crumbled down I have visited places in silence and they stand until they are gone then disappear in the slough of time and bulldozers remove this trace and that and what was there is not any longer and new homes like rakes scratch the land and piled up squat or tall ugly or not the new things cannot abide the old and the world is thereby ravaged and the places transformed and I sit back in this gasp and silence and awe and wonder on and on about all things and there behind me somewhere blinking the red beacon lights of the tall gray bridge.

METAPHOR ALLEGORY WHAT'S THE WORD?

293. METAPHOR ALLEGORY WHAT'S THE WORD? (Clarkson and the Crazy Man):

It was cold out and finally and it always seemed that once the cold really set in well then it was in to stay - two weeks straight of 15-degree days freezing one's poor ass off trying to keep warm get warm looking for somewhere to be and at that point words never mattered because whatever you said or meant to say couldn't change the reality of you're just being cold and a hopeless sight at that - dangerously thin again and close to some form of rotten freezing death a death not fit for rats since even they get scraps and garbage to pick through first but that was my situation that one time long ago and the only friends I had were the ones who'd offer me something and I often tried to show appreciation but what can you do what can you show when you've nothing to give or show for : blatant miserable down and out caterwauling poverty straight from Hell - a Hell of choice and abandonment - one had to figure (as I did) that I'd done this to myself) and I've always thought that if you're going to say something you might as well say it bold and not without a certain stance and if you really do have an opinion about something you should just get it out there for the world itself is already quite tired of the same old shrinking types who just go along and if you've managed already to meet your 'double' and come to terms with that other half than in order to facilitate your more complete personality you should - by rights - engage the world in what you're thinking or saying or doing and I know it's not always the way to make friends or meet people but what the hell who cares anyway and what does any of it matter - but all that's a luxury of those with something those who already have a life and if you don't what difference does it make ? nobody wants to hear from you there's never any sense in the sensible and everything else should be put aside in the dedicated pursuit of what it is you've SELECTED to do - so one day to keep warm I'm sitting around paging carefully through a bunch of John Ashbery stuff in that old crusty bookstore - essays about other people Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror Donald Duck in Hollywood on and on - and I was rather enjoying it all too as someone sidled right up to me and introduced himself as Wayne Waddle (pronounced Wad-del) and said that he was glad to finally meet me and that he was currently a friend of a D. E. Steward who was once a friend of mine and who still lived in Princeton thereabouts somewhere and said hello too but this fellow begins saying that in my last letter to Steward (was there really a letter?) he'd found me to be in error about a 'Clarkson' fellow who laid out the university and all the rest but he did think there was a 'Clarkson' College somewhere and of course a Clarkson Street in Manhattan and that maybe I was confused over them or perhaps there really was some connection between them and if so did I know - all these obscure things which I've found to be quite the rule when people whom one does not 'know' come up to you because of who you are to them and who or what you represent and begin peppering you with obscurities or in fact psychoses over this or that tiny little matter which seems then to hinge so largely on their lives but the fact of the matter here was that I didn't know this fool from Adam and was just listening in to see if there was anything I could get and I remember another time with some other fellow whose name right now I don't recall but I do recall his visit unannounced to my basement hovel and I still know where his place was and all the rest but the most astonishing visit it turned out to be as he completely turned on me to my face as 'false prophet' bad messiah and all that evidently being under his own impression of something I was to do for him in my guise as poet-leader-guru-guide-sage to him and evidently it certainly didn't pan out although it all was unknown to me but he came forth with a vengeance in his judgment of me by it and in much the same way I had to have him leave bitter and disappointed (if his name recurs to me I'll be sure to drop it in these pages) and this new fellow referencing D. E. Steward and referencing my reference of Clarkson was sort of appearing to me like that too - on the edge and making me wary of his next move - and by this I've always known what it must be like to be a 'public' figure upon whom so many hinge their wishes and desires for it is impossible to fulfill all of them or even many of them and the edge of betrayal and bitterness is always there and that can lead to so many other things (just think Judas Iscariot to Christ - speaking of betrayal and bitterness - Judas expecting the imminent worldly Kingdom and a political revolution with Christ as leader and when none of that started materializing and he began to see differently well then BETRAYAL was immediate and imminent and that same betrayal was unavoidable according to the already written storyline - if one was to believe all those nutcase religious types) HOWEVER the fact of all this lunacy was that this guy was crazy as all get out and maybe knew me from not knowing me at all - just imagining for some moment that he could arrest me with his visage but all of this makes you want to say 'HEY! I never said anything like that ! you're reading your own wishes into it!' and these people are very dependent and actually quite weak in their stark raving madness about demands and desires they have of you as a figure of their imagining but it all can quickly get pretty messed up and very confusing so right here and now I advise you (reader) that if any of this ever occurs to you don't say you weren't warned - and Clarkson whether or not it's incorrect or correct or something I've completely made up is my choice and my selection and I stand by it all.