5) Picture Haikus

click on an image to see a larger version

I stood transfixed
by the blue neon light
and the purple sky.
It was hot and humid,
and I wish I remembered the music
that came blurring
out of those speakers.

Raymond Chandler once wrote:
"There's nothing emptier than an empty swimming pool."
But a skiing resort in the summer
can be just as vacant.

The two of them
played with a piece of wood for a bat,
and a ball made out of rags.
They were very serious about baseball.
All Cubans are.
They are the most elegant players.

Electricity is always a problem in Havana.
Refrigerators don't work all the times,
and neither do door bells nor telephones.
Nor elevators, of course.
Pulling things up outside of the houses
seemed like a more reliable solution.

You couldn't buy much in the groceries,
neither in Havana, nor in the country shops
on the other side of the bay.
Food was difficult to find, especially vegetables.
On the other hand: I never saw a beggar.
Back in Los Angeles, it was a shock
to remember how much there was to buy everywhere.
And how many beggars stood in the streets
and opened their hands.

Shortly before I took the picture of the shoe-shine stand
underneath the arch of this glorious building,
I had walked into an old movie theatre in the neighborhood
called "America".
On the mosaic floor of the entrance lobby,
it showed a big, simplified map of the Americas,
laid out in colored and golden stones,
with a little black bean
lying smack dab in the middle
between North and South America,
like in a womb:
That was Cuba.
And the shoe-shine stand,
when I came back out into the sun,
was American, too, I thought.
In the true sense of the word.

Taking the tunnel under the river
and coming out on the other side,
you were in a different world.
Havana was an apparition
out of the future
of her own past.

Some colors were reoccurring
all the time in Havana.
The explanation I was given
for all those cars
of the same light blue, was
that a couple of years ago
blue had been the only paint available.
There had been green or yellow years as well.

I waited a long time for a car to come by
that I liked.
Sometimes you need such help
in order to know
when to press the button.