Anthony Wright
Beat Underworlds
What Price Will You Pay If You Fall?
But his travels continued even then…On the road the lonesome traveler searches for Satori ... Feels like Crane after the Bridge, weighed down by cults of death ... Artaud, losing his mind among Tarahumara vision valleys ... Burroughs, killing his wife playing William Tell with a Smith & Wesson … Kerouac, stoned, writing Tristessa on the toilet ... She shoots up -- noxious fumes crowd his soul...
He hits the lands to find a protagonist ... He could be a Killer of models in darkness, in his eye a former love... He saw the nuns at San Antonio & picked up his discourses: Jonah, Revelation ... This is a deeper trip, sunset's tears now lying in silvery abode shaded by black eyes, embarking for the Underworld ... Swollen libido emerges from the shore, watches him...
I may be a killer, pulling out & away, in her eye a former lover, scattered by the Mexican breeze, the thrill of danger ... To wallow in every world the same at the bottom of a glass... Mango fields of the Golan heights, F16s roar over fields on the way to the daily sortie ... Distant machine gun fire tak-tak-tak from the Lebanon, bombs exploding...
The valley, gently sloping, vivid green crops, flows to the shores of Galilee, where they say the Christ walked upon the waters; where Peter nearly did it, too, but sank ... Here I swim, after my toils, among Arabs, Jews, or sometimes alone, & that is the best, the best time...
One day I find a beautiful shell, thrown up by the surf ... The shell travels with me, like a sigh of freedom, when I look at it ... & just as elusive & meaningless, it is...
Because God is great.
New York Funeral Song
(Ode To R.R., MIA)
"He (Death) asked me from where did I come? I replied that
I came from a certain town which was not so far from his place."
-- Amos TutuolaDid you get that shot? The vacant lot of sky you mirror? Did you aim toward the smoke & white noise, TV repeats jamming in your mind, the glass cloud of Mount Saint Helens? You got her, I bet -- drunk in the stagnant pool, fleeting lights of the walk-up tenements, howls that roamed the subway line, giving succor to your newspaper soul.
Slow zoom with tracking shot, yesterday's news -- all yesterday.
No leafy suburb for you, no flat, banal hopelessness -- Centro is the Center: the universe stops here. But you scored the wrong end, man; you're the Wrong Way Man. That ol' universe threw you a wobbly. The mountain gig distends, playing on Afghan time, liquid, immemorial, seas connecting cities -- the ones you've seen and those you made real. You can be your own Buddha (so make a pagoda of thyself). Expose over so the image becomes lighter.
Now the door opens, as The Night of New York taxis must descend
& The Night of New York women must ascend
& The young Night of tired whores/ Night of stripper/ long Night of glue sniffer fast in its friendly hail ... & rush hour traffic in montage fashion
Must ... Must ... Must.*** White bird on the subway line rides the Blue Carriage, next stop a Coney Island state of mind. Now the cocks crow in the nick of time, taking whiffs from garlic necklaces. That bird she's trapped between the veils, on the log line called mortality. Now it's a runaway train, the past rushing past your red light -- all aboard!
Montage closes in on dusk, darkness enclosing hysteria.
We're not going anywhere. The scenarios have stopped.
The great city watches us.
The great city waits.Green, move, and the world slips into gear, the glass looks back darkly, making allusions to your mass exodus. Here the light of fluorescent night, airplane lights, heading to the last stop, beyond glittering dollar sign happiness. Roads wind in the night, by a vanished river that polluted the future. Footsteps echo off concrete, the wind assumes a dreaded aspect. Soft focus apartment: the friend is blurred now, as you recall your own. Your America is the smiling whisper, a kiss to lost smiles, vanished names, headlights on the street, the mystic Weegee night. It becomes the moon, molten bad and rising, over what was and what never will be: of Sleeping Gypsy cloud cover cages, world cities, stars caroling in the sky. Great cities, riding swiftly -- the world is full & warm trees cloak your neon. Here the city of world & dark Ferris-wheel apples & the letter not sent. It's the Big Nowhere.
Taboos on showing the face: ends on long shot.*** Now the deep khaki hues of Madrid, driver blinks and Florence spins New York New York New York, man. Gonna dream my ghostly freak show -- through Lisbon if you've never been, sink the wine of red midnight thoughts. Tattered shirts lilt about our frames, twist in silent marble grace. Fate up against your will, an old song to howl that silence from ranging cockpits of vision ... The silence of these spaces frightens me.
Come & see the world cities: great cities. The World is full: City of World.
It's a Big Apple Big Taco Big Nowhere.
Are you closer?
* I first met Roanoke Ray in Mexico City in 199-. He was in his late 20s then and coming down off a late night taxi shift through perfect storms in Boston; an off-off Broadway Becket role; guitar picking for a New York punk band; and his Own Private USA cross-country motorcycle trip to primarily, I'd suspect, get his eye in. That's theatrically, musically, geographically (marry those synchronicities) when the I sees itself in camera mode and realizes its own vast drama. I don't know if he'd have called La Capital "great" in any sense of the word but there was a world full of it, the only world for the briefest moment: fast, seedy and of tremendous girth. He saw the ghosts of Tenochtitlan encroaching through the haze by wandering the streets of the metropolis -- breathing its grime and defying traffic while grimly negotiating the panic.
Roanoke Ray had a need to witness and interpret his yearning to unconditionally embrace the world. He used a collector's Leica to do so. He ranged beats from the graffiti-torched abodes of glue sniffers & street kids to obscure tango halls in De Efe; the refuse smiles in the slums of Guatemala City; sugar cane trains to nowhere in Panama; Burma's heart of rebel-infested darkness & sun-glinting aortas of pagoda-posted waterways; the salient underbellies of Europe's great cities, New Worlds to Old, Roanoke Ray scaling his heights closer to heaven -- delineating a mosaic of darkness with the eye of a qualifying light.
New York City was home and when the dough ran out as it always did he was back there teaching photography. It was a flexible regime that allowed him to set his own hours and be his own man. Roanoke Ray was also a war junkie, fascinated by Vietnam, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Chechnya. He immersed himself in the artistry of the legends: Robert Capa, Tim Page, Neil Davis, the Bang Bang Club. It struck me that Roanoke was honing his skills, waiting for his war.
He was in NYC on September 11, 2001. I can picture him hitting ground zero, shooting off roll after roll -- the I in camera mode -- which is to say removed, oblivious to the Twin Towers' impending collapse. I see him there, the only place where he really belonged: in the realm of the vanished -- anonymous and free to disappear, at last. That would be his true deliverance.
I've e-mailed him since that fateful day. I've not heard back from him. I probably never will. Roanoke Ray was already gone. He worked hard at being a wraith. He'd long since dropped from the radar screen of his family and friends. Those few mutual associates who still recalled him from the old Mexico days always sought the lowdown from me on Roanoke Ray. Maybe that's because us ghosts always ride together, and they sensed I was on my way to join him.
