It is difficult to show what I am working on now here because I have a lot of physical things to do to the images yet. This color photo will get texturized and muted. I will transfer it to Arches paper and then apply coatings to it. I'm not sure how it will end up, but I have to start with something this saturated. I think. I'd like to work toward something like these two Sarah Moon images.
I'm not there yet, but if I have time to work at it, I hope to come up with something I like.
One night, I was wandering around Old Key West looking for adventure and excitement. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you are not. Standing on the sidewalk in front of Sloppy Joe's, looking across the street, my eye was caught by a tanned girl with white hair and a white dress. She was looking directly at me. I think my knees buckled a little, for I slid down the wall into a crouch. She did the same. And there was a flash of white underwear like the headlight I seemed to be caught in. Startled. Nailed.
She crossed the street to where I barely stood and introduced herself. She was a white girl, a pale girl gone brown. Her hair was almost translucent, her eyes a piercing blue and mad. We walked, we talked, we had a beer somewhere. We were getting friendly when I heard a voice call out my name. The person attached to the voice didn't look like someone I would know, shiny shoes, his shirt tucked into a belt, his hair combed with gel. Then I recognized him. It was a fellow from home, a bartender who worked with my girlfriend. He passed for handsome in some quarters and I knew he had a boner for my girl. And there I was arm in arm with the tanned translucence, looking much more guilty than I was.
The translucent blond came back to my room and told me her story. She lived in Key West and had a child who was with his father up the keys. She had come from Connecticut where she had been a hooker in a high class brothel that served the Dupont Co. executive team. That is where her father worked and she was trying to kill him, apparently, for she and her father did not get along. The details of all this took my breath away as she sat there, a beauty, a vegetarian full of sun and sea and wind. I liked her. We were friends.
The next day, she came to my room to get me to sit on the dock with her near where I was staying at the gulf end of Duval. She had mangoes and wanted to eat them by the water. I would go. But just then the telephone rang. It was a shock. I didn't use phones much and I wondered who would be calling me. It was my girlfriend. My heart stopped as if I was more guilty than I was. I spoke in that strange voice that trying to control panic can cause all the while waving my hands and putting my finger to my lips trying to let the translucent girl know not to say anything. She smiled an evil, knowing smile. I remembered that she was not a good girl but a devilish imp or worse. The moment was bad.
My girl wanted to know how I was doing and chatted on in an unnatural way, my mind yanked in several directions, wheels turning, tires spinning. And then she dropped the bomb.
" I hear you were out with a pretty blond last night," she said.
"Wah wah wah wah wah."
Funny how those things work.
As I said, the pretty, tanned blond, the translucent hooker and I were friends. And we stayed that way for a long time, she writing me letters, me looking her up whenever I came to town.
Eventually, I think, the bartender had his way with my girl.
And I remained pure as that translucent snow.
Better than the New Yorker, I'd say. At times, that New Yorker is so stuffy. :P
ReplyDeleteYour blog is fun. It feels like my blog too. I spend so much time in critical mode, I forget writing can be joyous.
Oh, I really like the bright saturated colors of that photo. Lots. Could be those are the current two colors dominating my surroundings -- a robins egg blue with splashes of bright red. I miss hands though. I was having a conversation with someone the other day -- he said that old thing "eyes are the windows to the soul" and I said yes but hands don't lie. They are always expressing themselves...
Here are a few pieces of a fable I am working on. A Thanksgiving gift for your artistry and sharing it with us.
1.2 Chasing Rafu
Gauze Veil, orange silk slippers
and baskets woven from Katsura
when you stand on the Bridge to toss petals
the Koi know your willow-bent smile.
The stork's wing mimics
the swish of your kimono
look how the bearded poets follow,
like silkworms to white-mulberry;
I call you.
1.3 A correspondence with Cumae
Through one thousand braids of mist
the jar falls
hits a gnarled pine knot and cracks
open. Sibylline flutters out the small rift,
a pink moth.
a gray mouse. a spotted spider.
the changeling.
The Capitol poet writes back
on white birch in his blackest ink;
the spring wind undulates the gold dragon
on his tattered canopy. Once his carriage was cut
from perfumed wood, his coffin carved
in magnolia. Now he wipes thick wine
from his lips to wide sleeves and waits
outside the jade gates.
Sibylline, soundless, makes note.
1.4 Hare Moon
In eddies curled the color of May's helpless sun
So-shu washes with bergamot soap unpacked
from his thread-bare satchel.
The river's icy fingers
pinch his cheeks into a pair of apple blossoms.
Long ago he left home folded
in the butterfly's wingflap. His heart a stranger
to the luxury of familiar.
All day So-shu pounds the cassia tree
in service to the Genii --
all night he dreams
under the gallop of Chandra's ten white antelopes.
1.5 Signs Sho-shu was to become a poet
The visiting brahmin came to my village chanting
"om mani padme hum" and counting japa mala beads,
the same year the house cats had 10 kittens. I remember
their small heads like heavy buckets, fallen on tiny paws,
the blue thread butterfly on mah mah's robe and the fishwife,
monkey-faced, a basket of fish on her sparrow shoulders;
the open curtain of my window
the peep of sun.
1.6 Sho-shu to Li-Po in a Letter, Undated
It was the Greek who gave Magician
the lodestone
one day in Choan on the road cut wide
into the mountain;
on a day tree petals snowed
into drifts, their sandals kicked in rhythm,
a pink smoke.
I was small, practicing my stilts but I spied
and saw how they laughed, their heads close,
despite different tongues.
It was later that night the gold saddled men
brought the Princess
in the jewel-crusted carriage -- I remember
the hillside trapped in silver mist;
when the dark man put the rock into Magician's palm
the stars rushed from the sky like pins
and we became fastened as One
under a mysterious cloak.
My most trusted friend,
I am eager for your reply even your admonishment
for saying too much but
have you not heard?
The people in town no longer Believe.
At least the translucent hooker out to kill her father was a vegetarian :)
ReplyDeleteI like the "lost in the headlights" line, lots of things light up in a situation like that.
The girls I meet shop at yankee candle.
Have a great Thanksgiving!
ReplyDelete