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| gene fowler |  | 1. 305 HONDA ("listening to the wind...") for Gary Snyder Leaving a forest of bikes, leaving the university, headed for San Francisco. [After watching the wistful look at a different set of handlebars, a wider grip, a deeper control.] Leaning into the curve, sliding along the arm of inertia, settling into the traffic, edging around it, headed for San Francisco. Move forward, hold onto me, not the bike. Find the center of gravity, the Buddhist oneness & uniqueness. Leaning against the arm of the curve. Two poets, personal perceptions one rider, multi-armed, -legged. Point of intimacy: from the first tools, crafts, metals & men laboring, hot, sweat wetted, laboring with flesh & minds. Fires & dreams, fires & gradually the machines. The long sight. The whole technology, a series of carefully timed openings, man with his fire manipulating the frozen rhythms of road surfaces, the intricate network of wind-rivers, the falls, lurches, sudden eddies. A line of intended movement. Be loose & heavy against the movement's changes. The changes - we throw our movements out, read them & prophesy. Along a bay shore highway, wind falling loose, snapping tight with a whipped crack at my ear, past drift-wood sculptures on mud-flats - a sailing ship, a locomotive, a huge & angry Indian - movie sets, but with a looser texture, allowing the different movements of sea & sky to show thru. Past - leaning to the curve, headed for the tollgate & the rise of the bridge. A quarter given, a brief touch of a stranger's hand, shoulders moving in front of me & the bike jumping up over the bay, drawing the winds into the center - the bay, like any sea, the lands rushing into the center, the carefully timed movements of man & his fire. The other poet calling back over his shoulder, the voice cut loose, drawn thin, wavering, snapping past my ear. Gone. Missed. A strange wind-eel, wavering, curious, vanished. The silent wind-eels crawling like ropes over my forehead, thru my hair, down my neck. Vanishing. Wind-eels edging around my glasses, pulling at them. Testing my vision. Crawling into my eye-sockets, changing the shape of things seen - the shape-changers, the wind-flowing & sounds of rice-paddy girls & distances. The bridge supports reach up, drop back, & the wind rushes down, pushes at us, keeps up its peculiar chants & animal cries, comes out of the void & sings of the invisible planets, suns, distances; & the changed landscape sits in its new perspectives, indifferent to the wind-rivers, silver & muted violets, the poems at the edges of the bay large shapes at the edges of the bay, chiseled out of light the rough sketches, reaching out of sight, nature's poems & the clumsy rectangles & silent windows of man's, the edges of the grounds carefully surveyed, the hours of construction computed, paid for. The cathedral chants of the wind; we lean to the curve, falling into the shadow of the city. Our sound louder, now, than the wind-rivers'. Words coming back, & a heaviness, & the old geometries carrying us over subdued hills; falling into the shadow & headed for a vodka martini. | |
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