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I am happy walking the East Side Trail on an autumn day, the sun light making the people shiny walkers with ears plugged into their internal worlds nod hello, outside the whirlwind woosh of MARTA echoes through the painted tunnel, Huxley yard clanks and bangs, boxers grunt at Vesta gym, umami fumes from Brash Coffee, tittering children roll down the Patagonian hills, parents coo and labradoddles put nose to butt. Runners clobber the concrete with awkward strides, tats flex, pecs and boobs bounce, backs undulate and glisten ooh! that they were nude! Everyone, get naked now! KEEP ATLANTA ADVENTROUS FOREVER. The Great White is a golden calf to me, and I bow remembering William Osono, so far away and long ago, and the tires spinning, the jeep sinking deep in black silk while nearby, a real rhino eyed us BLACK LIVES MATTER is fading like an autumn marigold, graffiti portrait of Beltline Kev, who sings love songs to the handholding couples as he blades was given 150K just for being himself. Great work if you can get it! A tour group I am tempted to join, but the guide is speaking Latin American and I cannot follow conversations suffuse the jazz of the band on the New Realm patio, the white trumpeter thrusting his hips forward as he blows his horn into the sun It is not your fault, I drink too much milk, which is not good if you are walking Oh yes. Yes. She didn’t even talk to me, it was my fucking birthday and she didn’t say a word Oh baby, oh baby. You loving it? I’m sure you loving it. I’m loving it myself. A placard in a window reads POWER SERVES THE PEOPLE. Women in lulus, wide hips go wozo wozo thundering along like Zeus, proud and bossy cyclists and everything on wheels, it’s a regular Richard Scary things that go hippty hop and bop in a billion years, the sun will burn the earth to a crisp if we don’t do it first. That is as it will be, and it will be right, for now a skateboarder expands beyond the skate park to roll up the embankment under Freedom Pkwy and the blue stop reads YOU ARE HERE! I’m dreaming …I’m just dreaming… I want to smoke a cigarette with Frank O’Hara, and cough and cough until he pats my back I think about sipping a glass of cab on the Kroger patio--but I’m good. Yeah. I’m good, y’all.
Notes: The East Side Trail is a section of the Atlanta Beltline, a 22-mile concrete loop around the central business district. On any day, but especially a sunny, temperate one, it is jammed with people, their dogs—sometimes their snakes and mongooses—and their conveyances—bicycles, unicycles, skateboards, rollerblades, segways, scooters of all kinds. It’s a circus. It’s a kinetic collage, a jazzy quilt of nature, sculpture, graffiti, commercial and political signage. Buskers, hawkers, laughter, talk, a woman practicing fiddle as she walks.
Influenced by Frank O’Hara’s “Steps,” which makes observations about a stroll through Manhattan, I have tried to capture the compelling chaos of the East Side Trail on a busy day. It’s impossible to do—but why not try? Afterall, a walk on the Trail, which I often take, makes me happy. For the most part, the people are happy. Diverse. Beautiful.
The poem is a catalog of observations stitched together by enjambment and conflation of images as it references places, people and activities. Also, I remember a visit I made to the Masa Mara, when William Osono, a guide, attempting to please my wife and me, drove the jeep off the road to get close to a rhino. The jeep’s tires sank in the soft “black silk” mud while the rhino, ignoring us, continued to graze.
It’s a found poem, too. The conversations are actual ones I overheard.
The picture is one I took of David Landis’s “Great White” at the junction of the Eastside Trail and The Path. Landis’s installation, “33 Oaks” is just a short distance away.
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