You robbed a fuckin' bank in my neighborhood, dude!
- Scruffy, white, with grey sweatsuit, baseball cap pulled low, screaming into his cellphone, pissed.
Bayuk
You, friend, came to my city. As if the city breathed. As if thick soup bayou water and flying fish.
Bayou from the Choctaw bayuk, through the Louisiana French in 1710 or 1766 or 2005. These languages write marshy stagnant sluggish inlet or outlet of a river or lake or swamp. Slow movements evade verdorous riverbanks where catfish store their colonial coins. Frondescense hides five hundred million dollars in golden silver coins waiting in the muddy thicket. Glop. Stock markets explode. Glop. What wouldn't wait that long to be free?
For you, friend, the air was thick and helped you breathe. You rolling down down from the dryland Rockies across Panhandle plains and North Central Falls, the motel you survived brothels and pimps. Your breath smoothed as your pharynx supposedly relaxes. A place you felt you knew, this South from films and genes long removed. The refineries chuckled and burped out greater quantities of belching white smoke. The cruise ships moored on cobblestone coastal alleyways expelled waves rippling currents black black clouds of soot and incinerated waste. A miracle of the Gulf, you amazed: no continental shelf to fall off. The towering tankers lumbering by around the ferry boats at Bolivar. Citgo sells oil for the Bolivarian Revolution, sends tankers north to East Beach where we gape. Out there fisherman look for sand fish on the 22 1/2 Fathom Lump, wait for days for rescue swim to platforms appear at lunchtime sunburned and disastrous.
The water full of tar whitish pinnacles and the remains of sandbars made balls liquified and sand particles recreated.
The bayuk made history weighted charged with mud and silty bottoms. The bayouque drew our Gulf Coast unity traced our ways of life through folklore, right. The Ship Channel is the bayou and made the Bay orange brown and colorblind green. Water quality is reality. And so, when you asked what a bayou was, questioned me for its origins, I laughed and said, "There, allí, lo ves." El bayou, el que nos lleva de la mano.
Bayou from the Choctaw bayuk, through the Louisiana French in 1710 or 1766 or 2005. These languages write marshy stagnant sluggish inlet or outlet of a river or lake or swamp. Slow movements evade verdorous riverbanks where catfish store their colonial coins. Frondescense hides five hundred million dollars in golden silver coins waiting in the muddy thicket. Glop. Stock markets explode. Glop. What wouldn't wait that long to be free?
For you, friend, the air was thick and helped you breathe. You rolling down down from the dryland Rockies across Panhandle plains and North Central Falls, the motel you survived brothels and pimps. Your breath smoothed as your pharynx supposedly relaxes. A place you felt you knew, this South from films and genes long removed. The refineries chuckled and burped out greater quantities of belching white smoke. The cruise ships moored on cobblestone coastal alleyways expelled waves rippling currents black black clouds of soot and incinerated waste. A miracle of the Gulf, you amazed: no continental shelf to fall off. The towering tankers lumbering by around the ferry boats at Bolivar. Citgo sells oil for the Bolivarian Revolution, sends tankers north to East Beach where we gape. Out there fisherman look for sand fish on the 22 1/2 Fathom Lump, wait for days for rescue swim to platforms appear at lunchtime sunburned and disastrous.
The water full of tar whitish pinnacles and the remains of sandbars made balls liquified and sand particles recreated.
The bayuk made history weighted charged with mud and silty bottoms. The bayouque drew our Gulf Coast unity traced our ways of life through folklore, right. The Ship Channel is the bayou and made the Bay orange brown and colorblind green. Water quality is reality. And so, when you asked what a bayou was, questioned me for its origins, I laughed and said, "There, allí, lo ves." El bayou, el que nos lleva de la mano.
What matters is saying yes.
The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it's corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I'll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no...No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.
- David Eggers. The entire rant/dialogue is here.
Walking on Ponds
Walking the lantana, wandering shade pond asphalt tracks through. Running bayou vistas, could walk so far to fall through walkman bridge bike reeds engage the shore. Sun beating down on jerking, mad fish flying above the surface, suspending if only for a moment, breathing in the air escaping the current and the murk.
Letting Go
Being a writer, one has to live by letting go, by renouncing the reaching of this or that shore, but to let oneself become the meeting place of both.
- Rosario Ferré, "On Destiny, Language, and Translation, or, Ophelia Adrift on the C & O Canal"
- Rosario Ferré, "On Destiny, Language, and Translation, or, Ophelia Adrift on the C & O Canal"
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)