new poem
sense of place : San Fancisco, I
how can it be that I started out here
one foggy morning down Bush Street, cold cipher
of Bay-borne wind to my face and coffee which I
don’t really drink welcoming me from a girl as tired as I,
opening her small shop in time for lawyers and
businessmen to consume their mocha and read
their papers? how can it be that I was fostered on
this city, student first alien, alien first native - I
moved into the program of life somewhere else.
how is it that I can be seated, writing,
at a coffee-shop, Montgomery Street,
and hear soft Mozart fortepiano on
their stereo and it seems calm, it enchants
yet at home, a likewise recording is too much
it draws one away from drawing, ends writing
as clusters of footnotes appear and my head
whirls seperntine away from laptop and towards wall,
window, or bookshelf and thinks aloud, away from
subject, certainly off topic.
Mechanics' Institute at my right, tumble down
I do towards the Ferry Building and away from
cafe and bank towers and early morning to add
an afternoon into my dialog of what a city is to me:
it’s a watercolor wash of people, of business being
done willingly, quickly, proudly, and the Western world
moving right along. It’s you and now I, it’s a small island
in a large sea it seems. what a city is, town first was,
grew and became a place that cuts such a particular and remarkable public figure
so much, it’s too much, and to one prone to watching
architecture as some people watch birds, it’s really too much.
og hodet mitt,
slagene som en slange fra laptop og mot veggen.
and in a whirl of letters, Bokmål and English speak out
of latter-day adventures here, telling folks about it all
and making out devices of paper streets and shop signs.
I pull ideas off books like boxes of tea off grocers’ asiles;
I don’t matter anymore for it’s all real, skateboarding in
Inner Sunset and being an icon of morning travels as
one in thousands on MUNI. by early mornings on a train
I have been benumbed, I have numbered so much smaller
than a boy at the kitchen table, I have overheard everything
from surgeons about surgery to mothers about daycares :
this is place, this travel, but moreso it is place.
salty this is novel love of a moment to belong and still not even be known.
aetheneum of a city, but also a rat’s maze of streets and
memories, covering its shoulders the entire sky, its collective
day travels into night.