Don't Relax Yr Eye (or Yr Foot)

Cortland, NY (courtesy DistancesCalculator.com)

One of the books Cortázar brought for his expedition from Paris to Marseilles was Paul Blackburn's The Journals. Cortázar recalls how, many years before, Blackburn had arrived at his shack in Saignon, in the Vaucluse valleys, to work together on translations of Cortázar's stories. In fact, Cortázar attributes the inspiration to buy himself a dragon, Fafner of Autonauts fame, to the VW camper Blackburn was traveling with, along his wife and sister and an "enormous sombrero."

In The Journals, the poems from the last two or three years of Blackburn's life (he died of cancer in 1971), Blackburn brought everything he saw, did, read, and thought about into these poems. The first poems in the book (like the one below) recount Blackburn's travels in Europe, the later ones his life in Cortland, NY, where he was teaching until his death.

What follow is a partial catalog of the car parts of life from The Journals:

-Shoveling the driveway (twice; this is Cortland after all)

-New York State inspection for the "Gaucelem Faidit Uzerchmobile" (PB's VW camper)

-Giving directions (three poems)

-Traffic jam

-Fast-food joints off the freeway ("intersecting freeways insanely/landscaped by chickens in/constantly revolving baskets")

-Rest stops (twice)

-Tow truck

-"Getting up to move the car"

-Driving after his wife's father's funeral ("I drove very fast")

In "Vaucluse," Blackburn describes his arrival to Cortázar's place. It's the most detailed poetic description of shifting I know of. I'm not doing justice to Blackburn's punctuation and use of space on the page, but here it is:

A track ? Well yes,
& better than that .
the dignity of a dirt road
leading uphill and
full of rocks .

                            Three turns
you can make it in second
if you start fast enuf from the
pavée at the bottom . The fourth
you jus gottta shift down to first, one
smooth fast movement inside the bumps,
inandout / the clutch, very fast & smooth .

The machine claws its way up the final slope
Don't relax yr eye or yr foot's
pressure on the gas pedal
maintain speed   as the signs used to say in the tunnels

     right up that slope where there's a break in the
     stonewall to your left  .  the eye & foot  .  now swing
     fast and left    into the small field
                                                  made it?

     relax yr foot, shift back,  f you feel like it,
     to second  .  move into second, swing to park
     below most of the roofs of the town, the cliffs
     the church  .  It ain't where the buffalo roam, but
     back in neutral without a stall, you're
     at Cortázar's place, Saignon .