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© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
“Snapshot Gravity” is the fifth track on, and gives title to, Collisions of Reckless Love, a spoken-word CD produced and recorded in 2005 and 2006 at Open Path Studios in San Jose, CA. Musician friends extraordinaire, Gordon Stevens, Scott Sorkin, and Tim Volpicella composed, arranged, and played the accompaniment, the music juice, the propulsion behind this very personal piece, which also appears in my latest collection 51: 30 Poems, 20 Lyrics, 1 Self-Interview, published in 2011 by Bangtail Press.
Snapshot Gravity
Sacramento. Outer city. Mid-autumn
Saturday morning. Mid-sidewalk. Pushed
in a wheelchair, the gray-stubbled man,
dapper in his red plaid
tam-o’-shanter and matching lap robe,
comes grizzled face to grizzled muzzle
with a swaybacked gimpy Saint
Bernard-Rottweiler-maybe-Lab cross
pushed on a limp leash. Traffic jammed,
frantic, we—two anxious friends
lamenting with country-western threnody
the body’s plummeting descent—catch
between snatches of the oncoming
cars, the shutter-quick
glimpse of this soft
jowl-to-cheek encounter. The old
dog licks the elderly man’s sad face
into hysterics, into a laughter
out of his past. Hands
invisible, arthritic, anchored in his lap,
the man turns the other cheek
for more, their fun-loving nuzzle
facing the busy street
as if posing for the impossible shot. Why not
lift this picture from the fixer
solution in our darkrooms
shingled with 8-by-10 action
glossies of good karma? Why not
paste the captionless snap,
solo and centered, upon the black
last page of the hefty album
gravity will likely someday keep us all
from lifting off the bottom shelf? Time
decides who becomes this earth’s most
kindred—family, friends, acquaintances,
giving way to a blood-brotherhood
of strangers. Old man, old dog,
old portrait voyeurs—we all
take our over-exposed strolls
deeper into the residential flesh
where our hearts’ silent horns rejoice
after each close call, every chance
collision of reckless love.
For Quinton and Nancy
The poem was triggered—a decade or so ago, as I recall—while making the traditional Sacramento thrift store-antique mall rounds with one of my all-time dearest friends, Quinton Duval. Quinton and I met in September 1973 at the University of Montana in Missoula, where we were both enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Degree Creative Writing program. We became friends within minutes—connected at the heart and ear instantly, thanks in some part to our kindred-spirited affection for Country-Western Music (Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Tammy Wynette…) and, subsequently, by our attraction to a waterin’ hole honky-tonk in East Missoula called The Cabin, where we found ourselves perched 5 nights out of 7 while singer “pretty Jan Dell” and her country band played their last note as the 1:45 a.m. closing-time lights flickered on. After which, we would gambol, go-cups in hand, across the street to Taber’s Truck Stop for the only menu entrée—the $1.25 “2 eggs over easy, hash browns with gravy, whole wheat toast and coffee”— we could afford on our grad student teaching assistantship monthly wage of $211.18, the check stubs of which hold a sentimental place to this day in my archives.
Quinton and I remained close—talking 3-4 times a week on the phone—for the next 36-plus years until his death on May 10, 2010. He was the one and only poet-friend-critic to have read and commented on every poem I’d written, including the dozen or so written before we met. During our last years together, we laughed often about our past escapades in the very same breath in which we entertained, every bit as irreverently, our forthcoming mortality. I think that’s all I need to say about the poem “Snapshot Gravity,” the central image of which was glimpsed only by me—Quinton driving attentively in heavy traffic—somewhere in Sacramento as we made our rounds in search of my beloved vintage western neckties and cowboy kitsch, as well as Q’s quest for much finer antiques and collectibles. I remember returning to the house, where he recounted for his wife Nancy our “daily score” that afternoon while I scribbled a few roughed-out lines to a poem I was certain I’d engage when back home in Montana.
In closing, I’d like to emphasize that my friend Quinton became by far the superior poet of we two. His posthumous Like Hay, (Bear Star Press, 2011) is without question one of the finest, most humanly felt and most musically-rendered, collections of poetry printed in this millennium, as well as perhaps the last. I choose to offer as a sample his poem “Spoon,”—in small part because it just so happens to be dedicated to yours truly, but in much greater part because it speaks to the passions of our fathers. I was with Quinton and Nancy in Sacramento when he received the difficult phone call from his mother that his dad had passed. I lost my dad 17 months prior to losing Quinton, while my mother died three months after Q’s death—a tormenting trio of years, indeed. Thank goodness, our poems live on for a while longer.
SPOON
for Paul Zarzyski
There was one in my father’s tackle box,
your father had one too,
that could have been stamped and rolled
from a silver dollar but was nothing
so rare—sheet metal and chrome.
I loved the three ruby beads
threaded on the stiff connecting wire
and the little gold propeller, a kick
to imagine it calling out to the lunkers.But it was the hook, welded on edge,
dangerous, that thrilled the boy, the barb
poised, benign, to pierce the white lip
of the fish, hold him as he’s hauled
through the green ceiling of his world.There were so many things to name
back then, in the rainclouds, the boat
drifting on the early morning
lake, your father’s coffee and cigarettes,
fried egg sandwiches in waxed paper
waiting for lunch. We chose words,
to love them, to put them next to each other—
fish on the stringer we might
or might not bring back to the cabin, grinning
like the simple fools we still are.How many years will we still pull words
from the inside, fish bones, yes, and round tones
ringing like campfires in the crisp air?
We can’t forget all this, even when our voices
play tricks on us, haul us wet and terrified
into new worlds. We will gasp and love
the sound of gasping. We will turn
silver and glisten.
Snapshot Gravity—lyrics by Paul Zarzyski, from COLLISIONS OF RECKLESS LOVE, a CD imbued with Paul’s belief that poetry recited will, at times, blossom into song lyric sung—is now available on SoundCloud [click here].
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© Paul Zarzyski, 2012-13
created 02.28.12
