Big Money

The Camera Eye (43)

throat tightens when the redstacked steamer churning the faintlyheaving slatecolored swell swerves shaking in a long green-marbled curve past the red lightship

spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the offshore Atlantic

and the jag of framehouses in the west above the invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chewinggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook

and the smell of saltmarshes warmclammysweet

remembered bays silvery inlets barred with trestles

the put put before day of a gasolineboat way up the creek

raked masts of bugeyes against straight tall pines on the shell-white beach

the limeycold reek of an oysterboat in winter

and creak of rockers on the porch of the scrollsaw cottage and uncles voices pokerface stories told sideways out of the big mouth (from Missouri who took no rubber nickels) the redskin in the buffalorobe selling snakeroot in the flare of oratorical redfire the sulphury choke and the hookandladder clanging down the redbrick street while the clinging firemen with uncles’ faces pull on their rubbercoats

and the crunch of whitecorn muffins and coffee with cream gulped in a hurry before traintime and apartmenthouse mornings stifling with newspapers and the smooth powdery feel of new greenbacks and the whack of a cop’s billy cracking a citizen’s skull and the faces blurred with newsprint of men in jail

the whine and shriek of the buzzsaw and the tipsy smell of raw lumber and straggling through slagheaps through fireweed through wasted woodlands the shantytowns the shantytowns

what good burying those years in the old graveyard by the brokendown brick church that morning in the spring when the sandy lanes were streaked with blue puddles and the air was violets and pineneedles

what good burying those hated years in the latrinestench at Brocourt under the starshells

if today the crookedfaced customsinspector with the soft tough talk the burring speech the funnypaper antics of thick hands jerking thumb

(So you brought home French books didjer?)

is my uncle