BUSHWHACKING by FreyK Frey

You have to imagine all the bushes, shrubbery, grasses and wildlife in my apartment. Bushes are growing thick and multiplying, books practically falling from the shelves onto my head, crowding. It's a great density of a forest. Vinyl records, CDs, tapes, and parts of technologies, cords and plugs, something that should plug in to something but now it is no longer known what it was to plug into. Round and red at the end of a cord, metallic and squarish, cords, parts, extensions! And that's just the first part of the bushwhacking.

Handlebar antlers of a bike are stretching out, taking up forest space. Startled, it could jump and launch a huge white paper landslide (I'm seeing Elizabeth Bishop here), the bike will fall, the papers will go with it, old papers on top of new papers, what a terrible archeological wilderness! Look, there are the notebooks, scratchings on them, loose leaves, missing pages, missing teeth. They are lisping, bewildered, wild eyed, all sizes of books, with all sizes of sketches, ankle high, knee high, thigh high. Get out of my way! I'm bushwhacking! Go! Go little notebooks, get away from me!

Why did I save you, you yellow paper taxi? What about you, you little broken mariachi band trying to dance with little broken arms and legs? (Here I get lost in the sadness of Mexico). Well you pots, then, you with earth that is so precious in the city. Did I really think your soil would support a farm come springtime? Now thinking about the pots I get lost in the sadness of the dry, dry earth, droughts, and the sadness of floods, and the sadness of bees, bees collapsing. But there is still the need for bushwhacking. Whack away -- at the pots and that stingy bit of earth in them.

Enough! Enough. I have to change pace. I have to admit that in the midst of bushwhacking -- I just brought in from the very streets of Manhattan bars of broken gold frames. They are beautiful, ornate, renaissance! Gold! Luxurious, far more luxurious than anything I've ever known growing up. There they were bundled with clear tape in front of Jack's Picture Framing. What a find! I'm in the process of throwing things out at home, and there they were -- in an elaborate golden pile, golden frames in pieces, Gold!

I saved them. I hugged them in my arms, like saving a crocodile I think, and I brought them home. Would they bite, destroy me, take over my apartment? Would I house them only to throw them out? Greed and love competed with the idea of a clean, clear space, a Celestial City.

I must now give up my idea of a simple Japanese aesthetic. I must give up the bushwhacking romance too. How does this gold fit into a rustic backwoods story? Gold? This gold did not get found in California, little grains in a pan by a stream, but in huge four-inch thick hunks of a four-foot long frame, ornate with broken golden paste embellishment. They are very rough indeed, rusty nails of all sizes stretch out of their edges clawing for attention, scratching to get back to their place in the world, to grandly enclose what is worthy of them, looking for a masterpiece -- or looking to assure some poor picture that it is a masterpiece.

So here's what could happen. I could take these golden sticks, boards really, out to the bush. I could set them in some sand and frame a rock, or cactus. It isn't likely I'll do that, but it is not likely that I will throw them out either, unclaimed, pretentious riches from the streets of New York. Back in my apartment I'll take poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop wrote a whole poem about an eraser's unicycle, a typewriter's terraces, the stubbed soldier-cigarettes in her ashtray.