While the Girls are Off Shopping...

"...wondering who the f*** is on mad McCarthy's porch..." is a snippet from Jack Kerouac's vast grand beatific wild experimental novel Visions of Cody penned in 1951-2 but its glory remained unpublished until 1973, and it's just Ti Jean gazing, examining, watching, peering, wondering, contemplating, running, driving, drinking, thinking, and penning, and I picture him slumped in a porch chair in October: cool, dry, long afternoon slanting light across pale warped wooden planks and just brushing a peeling weathered railing pushed against the azalea thicket. Mrs Smith is carting home groceries in a wheeling squeaky black wire basket, Tide and cornflakes box bumping along behind her, she chewing gossip fed her by Mrs Peterson around the block beneath a sycamore regarding minister Ralph and the new choir director Miss Angel behind the eyes of the sanctuary, and here she spies Kerouac slumped leaning back in frayed wicker porch chair, his pen in hand poised in delicate thin air, paused in fury like a hummingbird hovering inches from the spiral writing pad, pausing to glance from cool shadows into which he'd retreated to record in hermitage silence--broken only by the spooked untamed horses of his mind--a flooding memory of nights and nights ago a nonstop dialogue with poet Allen Ginsberg, the two unkempt and hungry almost running talking at the same time finishing each other's thoughts and beginning each other's sentences, interrupting dreams, beaten leather dark brown shoes flapping and skidding across the rising sidewalks of upper Columbus, sniffing the spicy brine of a San Francisco August, the drifting Bay, yeasty bread, coffee grounds, oregano, honeysuckle, lavender, pine, the two men wild-eyed, grimacing, laughing, raising artful fists to heaven's iron gates and spitting scorn on hell's burning glass boardwalks, sharing Blake Genet and songs of Whitman, Charlie Parker's sax blow of young jazz America, the ring and hum of Autumn night, the running of the bullish, Buddhist helpless and hopeful children burning fuses and not waiting for the ink on crinkled page to dry. This Mrs Smith returning moment's glance sees in the glassy eyes of Kerouac's shadowed slump--not the tempest and lightning flash but the inward gaze--and this short phrase I remember while penning in a spiral Steno Notes 80 pages 6x9 sitting at the Sunset Bar and Restaurant at the edge of Guatemala's Lago de Atitlan in the bustling lake coast Mayan town of Panajachel, and I too am slumped but the gleaming daylight warms and the cool clouds bless. Diamond flickers of sunshine dance upon the metallic green of the water. A Mayan woman sits on a low wall above the lake bordering the coastal paved walk selling peanuts, cashews, almonds in gallon bags. Scoops buried in the bags stand waiting. Colorful Mayan traditional dress of vibrant greens and deep sea blue and fiery orange, and she lets the billowing girls hang. Her dark-skinned husband accompanies her on late lunchbreak, new blue jeans, gray red and white checkered flannel shirt, earth-brown Stetson. They both slowly lower strands of take-out spaghetti into their tiny daughters open mouth (I didn't see her behind the cart she was so small and unmoving). Volcanoes tower on the southwest coast in shimmering dark jungle green. Hot afternoon smoky white and ship's hull gray clouds churn and tatter in the Guatemalan rolling sky winds throwing shadows over the waters and summoning emerald bands of current and sparkling sunshine to race west across the long lake. Mountain ridges slope and stomp on onto Atitlan in greater enclosing hazes to the misty western ridges far along. Taxi boats skate across soft waves to ferry gringos to pleasures in Mayan towns of San Pedro, San Juan, or villages hidden in coves. Heavy white hull gray clouds bulge and plosh across the sky exploding flowers behind the volcanoes and dip and bow in the valleys between peaks, not two separate weather phenomena but a primordial dance of earth and sky.... A mariachi band has like an incoming tide drifted into the bar to serenade the Guatemalan afternoon, steely vibrato cry of horns. I hear the singer fill the valleys of quiet between the swarthy and pleading trumpeting peaks rising. The Mayan nut seller has I spy over my beer lifted her dirty-face tiny daughter up to stand upon shoulders to see and hear the trumpets and song. The little girl cranes her neck to see, toes pointed into her mother's dress...she waves at the music, and smiles wildly.