Meg, Onions and Snow

[Poetry rises from weakness. Poets are flawed and weak and those who lack these particular shortcomings are punished. Shunned by beauty or god for lacking vision. Those who most need compassion are disallowed - due to their need. Can this be so?]


1/21/91

She has a picture of Jack Kerouac on her wall. I didn’t know that’s who it was or that she took it down here -- mural on the outside of an abandoned building -- which is where we are now but we can’t get in because they fenced it off. Meg comes down here (or she used to ... not so much any more) to take pictures. It was beautiful when it was new to her but now it’s old industrial garbage. Not the same and they are going to turn this into an amusement park with stores and astro turf. Steve told her, "Hell. If we have a Holocaust there will be a lot of ruins to walk around in." He makes art out of found objects but says he’ll never get rich doing it unless he finds a Picasso.

I know people live under the bridges. I’ve seen their beds and carts and world’s made out of boards and twisted rust and things that have forgotten what they were originally. Can something be found if it continues to reek of loss even as you possess it?

Once Meg’s friend found two bags of onions. She found one of them hanging on her door when she got home from work. They’d fallen off a freight train. Chris. That’s his name - Meg’s friend. Another poet who spends a lot of time under the bridges and he looks always a bit grubby but his wife is very rich. He loves Meg but can’t leave his wife. I knew better than to ask why - so he gives Meg found onions.

People sleep in the abandoned buildings. When it's winter, I suppose they could build small fires. Mostly all cement - fireproof, but they’re ugly - things that won’t burn are ugly. Kundera said ugly can be beautiful, but pretty never can.

And we have found that here. Please don’t ever tell me that I look pretty.

One night Meg and someone else went into one of the buildings. She said it was so dark she actually stepped on someone sleeping in there, "...but I don’t even think it woke them up.”

After snow, it’s different. The signs of the world below bridges are more subtle - or more pronounced - but with softer tones. You can see footprints - so many of them - travel logs, a symphony of dark commutes - staggered, pointless, turning back on themselves, driven on and protected by inane purpose, a fortress built by madness in a human mind. Networking. Lines from cart wheels meet and cross. A stand off, a missed appointment. A quiet odyssey that won’t fit in the words for a book to retell but I feel it.

An artist I know who makes bronze monuments for museums, and statues for wealthy people’s backyards told me that gypsies live beneath the streets in tunnels. The smoke that rises around manhole covers is from their opium dens. At first I liked that story. But walking under the bridge later looking at the tracks - I thought about it. I found it too pretty - his story - too pretty to ever be ugly - and then fireproof - and then, beautiful.