The Sum of the Parts
Turk-turk Turkey comes jerk-jerk lurking on, tip to toe. Cautious, like ice just itching to melt. Through parkland, under low-lying limbs drip-drip-dripping with dew. Patient like mud settling where deer, galumphing, stirred up still water. Driving slow and low and through and through from tall grass to scrub. Look at them go, Bad Boys, checking out the quiet part of the woods ahead of would-be girlfriends, might be lovers, always moving cover to cover. Then right behind taking their sweet time wouldn’t you know here those Big Broads come, tut-stut strutting their stuff, proud and tall and don’t gonna be no one’s – I say not no one’s - stuffin’! Near twenty pounds each hey might look sweet. Best first think on this: Before you get to the meat have to beat back twenty pounds of lean, mean muscle, armored like a weaponeer. Got spurs on the backs of their legs sharp as a thorn. Jump up, shred somebody’s big fat belly like chop suey to a pair of cleavers; Got a beak like a pig sticker, fly in someone’s face put someone’s eye right out (good-night, dim the brights). So back away. Keep on lickin’ your lips that “Someone” gonna be YOU!
Morning catches the sheen, at shoulders, back, cusp of wing, iridescent as Mother of pearl but these ain’t no Girly-Girls, nor Choir Boys in Sunday Zuits. Feathers broad and flat as dragon scales. Neck like a reptile, long and ropey. Face a raging, violet and blue and crimson red, a horn of flesh in the center of the head. Bald as a vulture. Eye as dark as obsidian glass. Feet that leave a four inch track. Pickin their toes with a clickety clack!
Like those who have risen from the sea and crawled back in (seal and sea lion, whale and dolphin) some take to the sky only to return to land: Wild Turkey, this Jabberwock, weighty presence, work of art.
Less than the sum, more than the parts.
It was dumb luck, to find here, amongst the din and
whir..and..so too all the parts of this place…
“The fog is a soporific. Mesmer in his cups might dream of a fog like this. That sponges light. That muffles Time. That drowns all the remaining senses into deafness. So thick, no curl of turbulence follows them. So dense, it swallows them. An obliterating fog in which that brief exegesis which makes them visible is almost illusion. The mind is slow to grasp and for that the amazement of spirit is large, and lingering. The day will cling to this and I know it. The days that follow in a subtle way will be moistened by what is seen right now and therefore will not be the same.”
So serene and yet poignant, hovering in the margins
unobtrusive though alluring……. What a paragraph..
It’s odd to have found it at counterpunch where the usual discourse is more concerned…
There was a Mark Lender who for a time lived here.
He had a jewelry shop in an old building , what we would have called a storefront in New York…and he lived on the second floor over the shop……
I don’t know where he came from, but after several years, he sold the building and moved to the artists life in Tribecka. I have never heard of him since.
Those of us that knew him wondered at his departure
from our island fastness, from the main street of the dry town where the ferries brought the seekers of solitude along with those who are driven to spot the celebrities. From the beaches of lazy seals and naked ladies oyster flats and vigilant osprey. Back, back to the clanging churning metropolis of the material quest. Gone from the winding roads, the little houses
and the nature people… never to return… I wonder if he still dwells just a little north of ground zero….