317. LITTLE KNOWN MEN OF THE TRANSFIGURATION
LITTLE KNOWN MEN OF THE TRANSFIGURATION
Like a man I was walking now and my middle was the middle and all the birds
were screaming in some bluejay-frantic energy not worth anything at all but the
noise it made and as I crossed the straight-line street a jaggle of lights and
cars a mess of people all that happened at the very same time : abundant
buildings strapped in blacks and grays lined the sidewalks and every window
festooned with something trying to lighten the gloom and the upper floors showed
the window-cubicles of all those little shapes who entrapped themselves in
places like that : pencil cups sharpeners family photos and arty pictures all
this crap on each indoor window ledge seen from the street and giving somehow a
sad glimpse into the private third-floor lives of the traveling people who
worked within - walking forth each day to greet the new world which was really
the same tired old world and the nearby church yard the old grounds near the
park the sad old bricks and broken fountains by the old Friends Meeting Hall and
the nearby seminary grounds and all the rest in turn reflected the same dour
world : things shorn and broken fallen over and twisted like so many lives and
why I was here I asked myself why I was so damned self-examined at every step of
the way I could not know and why I wished to dwell alone completely alone the
only man on this forsaken and forlorn Earth was behind me but presented itself
as the only option I'd ever care to take part in - one play endless
soliloquy one long silence to brood over and a singular lone Mark Twain tree to
hang from forever - that was my saddle-Earth middle world place I lived lost
soul lost preponderance of evidence sir points to him being guilty points to his
guilt death sentence recommended better yet let's just kill him now he's not
really fit to live.
-----
Now I see how all this goes forward - there is ever a froth on the air and it changes to time and to the factors of time that we learn to inhabit (look look the wise men sit about hunched as well thinking of what to speak as they say - formulations of meaning for those seeking meaning and simple confusion for those others who get nothing more from it than that) and in the all-together the girl from Mundano Street or where that address in long-ago Montclair came from she looks back as if to Life and History together and is heard to say 'I knew there was something innate in this ability I have for getting by - not saying whether that is good or bad it has no matter always brought me along pretty well to see the places and levels of everything in my life - small stuff like from the Stations of the Cross to the words of some stupid song and I can always sing aloud and whenever I want!' and apparently that was enough to keep her happy but she continued (as if speaking just to me) 'my brother was a farmer and he lived in sad places - old flatlands covered with corn and oats and fields of grain which always looked so peaceful but which in reality took more work than mining gold I never knew why he did all that - he wasn't always a farmer could have been anything he chose at all but he stayed to that idea of going back to the land and faltered only when it got too much - wife kids cows barns horses dogs mortgages crop-loans Farm Administration services with repairs and new buildings and new construction for this and that and it all never seemed to end and it became too much for him eventually and yes it ruined his wife wrecked the family killed him in fact - he never even got that crazy self-satisfaction he was always seeking of satisfying some ancient need for husbandry and growing things and providing - no one ever really gave a damn for what he did and his product or whatever one calls that which a farm achieves his 'product' went for nothing - conglomerates and corporate factions taking his produce and taking the meat and milk from his cows and all his work and just turning it all into junk - every potato into some salty crap every can-load of milk turned into some confectioner's nightmare of junk baked goods at some wild corporate bakery in the tired Pennsylvania hills' and I said 'why are you telling me this ? how did it end ?' and she smiled and looked out and said 'not good - he wound up killing himself with a shotgun blowing his own face off in the end as if seeking true annihilation of self and identity all and it worked I guess - at the funeral no one even got to see his face or get a last restful look at him - closed coffin gruesome dead and death-riddled face blown away to smithereens and if he died in a minute or he died in an hour no one was ever really ever able to tell - by the way then how long can you live with your face shot off?' and shuddering to think I said nothing at all but thought of how I used to see the long willowy blue-green field of ripened and ready-to-harvest oats wavering in the breezes back in those days myself and how enchanting only enchanting they were to me - nothing like it anywhere else except perhaps the green sea - which somehow sometimes does seem to move in the same slow undulating and quite mysterious yet comforting manner : little known men of the Transfiguration my muddled hand held up the ribald one the schemer the one with the thirty fingers pointing skyward I sit in these my very last days arranging lines on paper stringing things along : outside the gifted horizon the old doorway beckons with chipped paint and a seventy-five year old mail slot someone installed back in 1940 when the entire world was yet stalled in its Gropius manger of trepidation and the bombs were yet falling upon unsettled gimcracks of towns and public halls and the rooms wherein lovers stayed entwined for fear they'd be lost and a million London wartime babies just now waking up to finish are understanding right now very little - a background of shade and music enhances the chances and all the babies singing together in a choir leave me feeling nothing if not blue 'I've never been this way before I've never come out of the nook so early who put this noise in place and what universe now is this?' that's what I heard along the hospital corridors where the victims were massing - burn'd faces broken limbs and buckets of chemical blood and supplemental vitamin tablets ground to a fine pewter color by anyone not already dead the doctors have all gone away the limping nurses limp for love and still thinking of her beau the thin one turned to me and said 'we found ourselves somehow walking beneath the monstrous oaks and elms still standing and at my feet was the grave of a grandmother - one I never knew - the crazy one the one put away the one who died in the asylum - the expansive hillside lawn and all the ghost people just walking around - duking it out with the white sheets of the other crazy dead and all I could do to keep from screaming myself was to say to utter just to spit out these words - 'leave the mystery ! don't take it out!' but myself to my God and now to you I say to tell you I don't know from where that came I don't know what it is I was even saying.'
Now I see how all this goes forward - there is ever a froth on the air and it changes to time and to the factors of time that we learn to inhabit (look look the wise men sit about hunched as well thinking of what to speak as they say - formulations of meaning for those seeking meaning and simple confusion for those others who get nothing more from it than that) and in the all-together the girl from Mundano Street or where that address in long-ago Montclair came from she looks back as if to Life and History together and is heard to say 'I knew there was something innate in this ability I have for getting by - not saying whether that is good or bad it has no matter always brought me along pretty well to see the places and levels of everything in my life - small stuff like from the Stations of the Cross to the words of some stupid song and I can always sing aloud and whenever I want!' and apparently that was enough to keep her happy but she continued (as if speaking just to me) 'my brother was a farmer and he lived in sad places - old flatlands covered with corn and oats and fields of grain which always looked so peaceful but which in reality took more work than mining gold I never knew why he did all that - he wasn't always a farmer could have been anything he chose at all but he stayed to that idea of going back to the land and faltered only when it got too much - wife kids cows barns horses dogs mortgages crop-loans Farm Administration services with repairs and new buildings and new construction for this and that and it all never seemed to end and it became too much for him eventually and yes it ruined his wife wrecked the family killed him in fact - he never even got that crazy self-satisfaction he was always seeking of satisfying some ancient need for husbandry and growing things and providing - no one ever really gave a damn for what he did and his product or whatever one calls that which a farm achieves his 'product' went for nothing - conglomerates and corporate factions taking his produce and taking the meat and milk from his cows and all his work and just turning it all into junk - every potato into some salty crap every can-load of milk turned into some confectioner's nightmare of junk baked goods at some wild corporate bakery in the tired Pennsylvania hills' and I said 'why are you telling me this ? how did it end ?' and she smiled and looked out and said 'not good - he wound up killing himself with a shotgun blowing his own face off in the end as if seeking true annihilation of self and identity all and it worked I guess - at the funeral no one even got to see his face or get a last restful look at him - closed coffin gruesome dead and death-riddled face blown away to smithereens and if he died in a minute or he died in an hour no one was ever really ever able to tell - by the way then how long can you live with your face shot off?' and shuddering to think I said nothing at all but thought of how I used to see the long willowy blue-green field of ripened and ready-to-harvest oats wavering in the breezes back in those days myself and how enchanting only enchanting they were to me - nothing like it anywhere else except perhaps the green sea - which somehow sometimes does seem to move in the same slow undulating and quite mysterious yet comforting manner : little known men of the Transfiguration my muddled hand held up the ribald one the schemer the one with the thirty fingers pointing skyward I sit in these my very last days arranging lines on paper stringing things along : outside the gifted horizon the old doorway beckons with chipped paint and a seventy-five year old mail slot someone installed back in 1940 when the entire world was yet stalled in its Gropius manger of trepidation and the bombs were yet falling upon unsettled gimcracks of towns and public halls and the rooms wherein lovers stayed entwined for fear they'd be lost and a million London wartime babies just now waking up to finish are understanding right now very little - a background of shade and music enhances the chances and all the babies singing together in a choir leave me feeling nothing if not blue 'I've never been this way before I've never come out of the nook so early who put this noise in place and what universe now is this?' that's what I heard along the hospital corridors where the victims were massing - burn'd faces broken limbs and buckets of chemical blood and supplemental vitamin tablets ground to a fine pewter color by anyone not already dead the doctors have all gone away the limping nurses limp for love and still thinking of her beau the thin one turned to me and said 'we found ourselves somehow walking beneath the monstrous oaks and elms still standing and at my feet was the grave of a grandmother - one I never knew - the crazy one the one put away the one who died in the asylum - the expansive hillside lawn and all the ghost people just walking around - duking it out with the white sheets of the other crazy dead and all I could do to keep from screaming myself was to say to utter just to spit out these words - 'leave the mystery ! don't take it out!' but myself to my God and now to you I say to tell you I don't know from where that came I don't know what it is I was even saying.'
posted by gary j. introne @ 5:25 AM
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