August 17, 2006

It’s morning here. It’s overcast.
It is a YMCA steam room in 1962…
Garfield, New Jersey
after the demise of the DeSoto
and after the end of the Studebaker (as we knew it)
one of which has sat parked on the same flat
tires for 20 years in my uncle’s backyard,
raising the question of the baby or the Botticelli.
I am going for a run now while practicing
my new Zen while running…
the counting of Mustangs. Most
would know me as moderately liberal, but to some extent
I am retrograde; and so, on the run,
an insight: Black is Beautiful. This is an expression
not so true of the DeSoto which demands
to be clad in red and chrome nor of the Studebaker
which must be true to its name: Golden Hawk,
but it is most true of the groomed
Pony: black,
deep, shiny and beautiful. And so there was
an easterly breeze on the run, refreshing, salvific,
and inspiring. In the metaphor of the ancients
and the language of the Renaissance,
the wind listeth where it will and into my mind
blew the a line of Milosz, skeptical though pious,
to the angels
we are a singular event and not a number
submitted to universal law. And with this
blew in the corresponding expression of Houllebecq,
cynical, intoxicated, and impious:
with the exception of a few geniuses (Botticelli,
I presume?) humanity is a mass akin to a school
of fish, a flock of birds…spiritless. Morally
equivalent statements though differing in attitude, ala
the Gospel of John from above … the Gospel of Mark
from below. In the instances of the gospels,
both uplifting despite their differing
anthropological perspectives, however,
in the instance of the Lithuanian poet
vis-à-vis the French novelist, one uplifting,
the other demeaning; one hopeful, the other a debaucher
full of cigarettes, slime, the Thai sex industry and
Irish whiskey. Would the world be better
if we tossed the baby, saved the Botticelli vis-à-vis
William Gass, and incarnated a couple of Joyce Carol Oates’
and Jim Harrison’s eccentric geniuses? Ah,
but then what of art? The Pony’s
parked outside in Buckhead in an unguarded lot
black, beautiful and undusted this morning
after yesterday’s rain. Counted on the run
one white Saleen, hot and throaty, one red coupe, one
red convertible damaged in the grill, one very
beautiful, like a speeding,
shimmering shadow, nearly the Zen
of the unseen, and one dull green.