Glimpses of Photographs
Bank Street at Albert Street,
late night, summer. Everything is deserted, not a car on the street or person
on the sidewalk. This street, conduit of all main bus lines in the city, so
treacherous to the nervous cyclist by day and yet so empty now at whatever hour.
My secret joy is to lazily pedal in circles on this street in the middle of
a hot night when a car only passes every few minutes. The high streetlights
blaze like a sun and cover everything with a yellow-orange blanket.
The hallway, a picture washed with too much or too little light. All I can see are bright reflections of the sun shining in through the glass/screen door, the outer door open, the inner door half open.
The bright sunlight shimmers in a broad strip across both walls, walls painted over and over and which seem to have waves and bumps on them from this angle. The light plays on these and makes little ghosts, reveals flaws.
The tiles on the floor here are white and solid, unlike the dull cheap ones in the kitchen and bathroom which counted the months by falling apart. I knew them all to be dirty and rolling with dust-bunny tumbleweed. Here the blinding sun hides them for the time being.
What else? Just that this 1920-era house was divided in two with shoddy renovations that made the old wood stylings stick out of drywall in random places like a ghost passing through a wall.
The top of the hill looking down Britannia Road from where it starts, sometime in bleak winter. I suppose this is how it would look if I went tomorrow and it were overcast. I walked down this hill four hundred times, maybe. This must be later on in the winter because various white salt stains are visible on the clear road here and there.
My main thought in the bleak winter was to wish for wheels, any sort of wheels, a shopping cart, a bicycle, a skateboard, anything to carry me down this long and ponderous hill in seconds instead of minutes.
Words fail me when thinking of that hill where I'd get off the 97 bus, perhaps at 6 pm, perhaps at 1 am. Some thing in life just can't be described. How do you explain four hundred walks on the same path where nothing ever happened?
Was my hair ever so greasy? It's a tangled mass of kind-of shiny 1700s-Frenchman sideburnsy coiffure deluxe. It looks teased, but it's not-miracle of inattentiveness, I assure you.
The front step of my old house, before those dreadful attempts at "modernization," ie replacing everything wooden with something plastic. This must be spring, because the branches of the tree have little buds on them. There's the step-sweepin' broom, there under it is the snow-shovel.
A little slanted wooden parallelogram holds 230 in brass stik-on numbers. Grass pokes out on either side of the cement path. The steps are well swept. How I loved to sweep them, how I loved to sit in the shade under that tree and take in the quiet street.
I wish I were in that unmade bed right now, so flawed but familiar. My giant blue comforter dominates the scene, and a variety of lesser white sheets and a smaller striped blanket set the stage. Some beige pillows… it just brings a tear to my eye. I could hide under them and not see the ugly wall, not see the trouble out the window.
On top of a trunk are some laundry baskets full of clothes… I still wear those clothes, and I always try and think "these were the pants I was wearing when I did that," or "this is the shirt I wore to Belgium," but it just doesn't work that way in my mind. They're still just some rags.
P. Avenue, some bleak late afternoon when the shadows are long and the sky is hazy. Mere paces from this spot is some house-arrest place where you have to sign in and out-imagine my confusion for months when I'd see a vending machine in someone's house. Y'know, in spite of all this, I just can't say anything bad about P. Avenue. Bury me under this very curve.
Number Seven bus waiting to turn left onto Bank Street. Cars go by and cars go by and no one yields. What is this that makes us think "I, one person, am more important than those fifty on that bus"?
Eyes cast downwards by our walls as hammers, chisels, "what is your passion?" he said. what other? tracing, slipping like a thief through the city unseen, dreaming of dismantling the systems of social/economic power that they strangle our nations like chains, cruel ones--how dreadful is life, how wonderful is life.
I feel simply miserable. I hardly slept the night all last. When I awoke, it was to think only of the declining thoughts and fantasmer about the massacre myself, model of film-starlet of the Forties.
Sometimes the test of your best just is not enough. Occasionally it waits, waits, that does not come to you by any means.
The aspect and single definition of my experience: my close friend and love is absent.
"You have been denied access to the system."