Over-the-Rhine.
Falling in love with the beauty. The waste, and the wasted beauty, this neighborhood. I am not a photographer, that has been established, tho have known, loved a few in my time and once wrote a poem about what a photographer said to me about how I “take the light” (as in how I took the light, then, according to what the photographer said to me, then; as in how I did not take the light but that I gave it… yeah, it was just something romantic to say, but it did make for a good [if unpublished, tho -- brightening -- heard at a well-attended public reading & maybe that is infinitely better, maybe]); so, therefore, go see a photographer’s images of this beauty of a neighborhood, Over-the-Rhine. And, there are, as you’d expect, many good places to stop and have a cup of coffee in this huge city, specific details another time, as I am packing up to go, to Newport, other side of the Ohio [River].
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Don’t know if this is still there.
First winding down from Kentucky hills: Cincinnati, freed from limestone and floating on the river. Only ten thousand years ago a wall of ice two miles high blocked the way and bordered the river. We hunted woolly mammoths in Florida then…built houses out of their bones.
Take a turn into Covington, KY where Jerry Springer wrote a check to a prostitute but they elected him mayor anyway. Near the clock tower, an old Victorian mansion hangs onto a street corner. On the bottom floor, one side is a magic shop frequented by local witches. On the other side a series of Victorian parlor rooms with militaria from the Revolution to Vietnam.
Sit in the leather chairs long enough and in comes a white guy with a shaved head and long black pony-tail above his right ear—Indian style. He’s got a $6000 Kentucky rifle he wants to trade. Makes his living playing Indians in films.
The rusting baskethilt sword you like is $15,000.
Wait longer and a wealthy Jewish man with girlfriend trailing behind sorts through the SS memorabilia. He spends his trust fund on Nazi stuff.
A local shaman comes in and spies a Nazi purple heart. He snatches it up for his mesa of sacred objects: a wound acquired for an evil cause.
By the door as you leave, a brown clay urn made by inmates from Buchenwald with the SS rune for hail as decoration. When you put the urn down a whitish substance sticks to your fingers.
“Don’t worry,” the store-owner says with a smile, “that’s dust.” The shaman takes the urn too: bottomless despair, a gypsy violin note that never ends.