Poet, scholar and gentleman, Robert Gibbons - a great friend of Ordinary Finds and through his books a constant Traveling Companion of mine - turns 66 today, Oct. 4…
—
Good Company
That they visited, that they knew us together way back when, & me even further back again. That we talked & ate & embraced, initiating yet another memory. Larger history. Wider archive. That this friend gave the gift of the photograph I asked they place a red dot on at the Cinco de Mayo Show almost five months ago to the day. (Black & white, taken in 1980 of miraculous stone outcroppings in Baja, Mexico, populated in its desolation, it measures 16 x 20, right behind me in the study, staying visible, making a lingering impression, even with my back turned typing this…) & that they were two of eight in attendance at our wedding twenty years ago today, simply accentuates the bulk of all those days spent alone. Forget childhood, more or less, alone. Alone, almost all alone, in fifty-four jobs from age eight to sixty-two. Sure, had a few colleagues in certain positions, a few libraries. Goombas in the fish factory, none but enemies in the meat plant, random acquaintances sewing textiles at age fifty-seven. Too young to relate to the older Puerto Ricans in the leather factory. Sure, alone as alone can be… Except… when I was with books. Can’t call their authors friends, I suppose, they didn’t give photographs, nor attend weddings, the kinds of things only a few friends would do, if lucky to have a few good friends as alluded to above, but just today, off all alone in between raindrops, I stopped to identify the tanker across the bay, Sonangol Kassanje rang music to my ears through binoculars, & went on singing, humming, when I opened out there at the foot of Fort Allen Park the classic anthology of Chinese poetry, The Jade Mountain exactly to the pages of Li Po’s Bringing in the Wine, & on the other The Hard Road, the former set to music, no less, Sober men of the old days, & sages are forgotten, / only the great drinkers are famous for all time. Or in the latter, simply, Journeying is hard, / Journeying is hard. I could simply list the names in three stacks of books in front of me now on this library table: Sontag, Harrison, Mallarmé, Cernuda, Alberti, Pound, Hemingway (with perhaps the greatest line of all Time regarding the gangrenous man in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity…) Rancière, Pavese, Montale, etc., calling them, not necessarily friends, we’ve seen what friends are for, but perhaps what my daughter called them, when sending the photo of the books taken at her friend’s apartment in Boston, where one of my own is surrounded by others surely more renowned, “Good Company.”
—
Above: photo of Bob the Butterfly Charmer, NYC, May 2012
3 notes |#