“no focuses . . . no certainty”

They took the Buick today, the Le Sabre that in 6 years I put an extra 100k+ miles and which, in the end, introduced me the the actual streets of Paterson. Looking at my notebooks, trying to reconstruct that first visit, I must have been driving a lot. A long series of pages on Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” signified the stasis of home in South Carolina, and the relatively untrammeled concentration of summer. Then follows some poem-notes about Milwaukee—was it just restlessness that brought me there? Something particular?—mentions of a meeting in Chicago, trying to sell a stock in Cleveland, some notes on bromeliad (which would seem to bring me back to Florida, but notebooks dictate the chronology of memory more than the order of fact) . . . neither Spanish, nor moss . . . Smithson on enantiomorphic chambers and Hotel Palenque “no focuses . . . no certainty” (and here, there is a time stamp with a entrance sticker from the Whitney dated 7/27/05), and then some poem-notes on Paterson when I first visited, at dawn “before the city remembers the psychosis/a thousand silky automatons/have cocooned its brain in . . . the cataract of the falls/like a stereoscope slide/in a restaurant dumpster./The Krishnas who turn out to be/convicts in bring orange jumpers/ Enlightened!”, relatively blank pages=NYC, a page on Lacan and angels—which again may have signified a return to home (Lacan: “the signifier is stupid”), but some notes on daucus carota led me to believe that there was also a trip to Montauk in there somewhere as the Buick always had camping gear trunked for spontaneous trips— that fine weed of summer, aka Queen Anne’s lace, was all along the way, but it was the end of Long Island where I finally attained its natural history.
All this, I guess, is vicarious living, since I haven’t been able to have that kind of spontaneous summer for a while (this is the third summer consumed by moving), although the Buick did some good work getting me from the South to Rochester and back (with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore and Asheville) and then all the way to Seattle before conking out for good. It completely died on the BQE last year while driving with L______ back to Providence, but, against all odds was resurrected at an Amoco in Queens. This particular 88 Buick was called a “poem” by N_____’s mother, and many a day it got me through the poem-streets of downtown Paterson, sometime festooned with lavalier mics—a make-shift and moving talk-show set. Because Leonard seemed to like it, I picked up Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook recently, and I could neither relate to the poet’s problems nor believe the veracity of his accounts of them, because he begins with an unfortunate travesty of Buick owners . . . and he has yet to own up to the model of his car. He only calls it “my efficient Toyota” (it’s obviously a Prius). No I prefer the Cortázars’ red Fafner from Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.










In the last few days, as I moved the limping Buick from parking place to parking place to prevent it from getting ticketed as an abandoned car, it would billow smoke from both ends; since this is Seattle, people would stop and look at me as if I were a baby-killer.

RiP also Nishiki 91, which was usually strapped onto the back of the Buick, and which, also, on that first morning in Paterson, glided me in a way more effortlessly than the Buick could between my random parking place, the Falls and the factories. The Buick was donated to Youth Radio, and hopefully it will be transmuted into at least a flash audio recorder; the Nishiki, by virtue of its being left there by mistake, will have many a Gothic intrigue in the VSW haunted mansion of art.

Last days in the Badlands: