Some San Francisco Poems: Sections 5-10

THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS

Combed thru the piers the wind

Moves in the clever city

Not in the doors but the hinges

Finds the secret of motion

As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices, murmurs

Flaws

In the wind

Fear fear

At the lumber mastheads

And fetched a message out of the sea again

Say angel say powers

Obscurely ‘things

And the self’

Prosody

Sings

In the stones

to entrust

To a poetry of statement

At close quarters

A living mind

‘and that one’s own’

what then what spirit

Of the bent seas

Archangel

of the tide

brimming

in the moon-streak

comes in whose absence

earth crumbles

Silver as

The needle’s eye

Of the horizon in the noise

Of their entrance row on row the waves

Move landward conviction’s

Net of branches

In the horde of events the sacred swarm avalanche

Masked in the sunset

Needle after needle more numerous than planets

Or the liquid waves

In the tide rips

We believe we believe

Beyond the cable car streets

And the picture window

Lives the glittering crumbling night

Of obstructions and the stark structures

That carry wires over the mountain

One writes in the presence of something

Moving close to fear

I dare pity no one

Let the rafters pity

The air in the room

Under the rafters

Pity

In the continual sound

Are chords

Not yet struck

Which will be struck

Nevertheless yes

O withering seas

Of the doorstep and local winds unveil

The face of art

Carpenter, plunge and drip in the sea Art’s face

We know that face

More blinding than the sea a haunted house a limited

Consensus unwinding

Its powers

Toward the thread’s end

In the record of great blows shocks

Ravishment devastation the wood splintered

The keyboard gone in the rank grass swept her hand

Over the strings and the thing rang out

Over the rocks and the ocean

Not my poem Mr Steinway’s

Poem Not mine A ‘marvelous’ object

Is not the marvel of things

twisting the new

Mouth forcing the new

Tongue But it rang

THE TASTE

Old ships are preserved

For their queer silence of obedient seas

Their cutwaters floating in the still water

With their cozy black iron work

And Swedish seamen dead the cabins

Hold the spaces of their deaths

And the hammered nails of necessity

Carried thru the oceans

Where the moon rises grandly

In the grandeur of cause

We have a taste for bedrock

Beneath this spectacle

To gawk at

Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid

Has covered them, a black splintering

Under the eyes of young wives

People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind

At every summit

Our overcoats trip us

Running for the bus

Our arms stretched out

In a wind from what were sand dunes

THE IMPOSSIBLE POEM

Climbing the peak of Tamalpais the loose

Gravel underfoot

And the city shining with the tremendous wrinkles

In the hills and the winding of the bay

Behind it, it faces the bent ocean

Streetcars

Rocked thru the city and the winds

Combed their clumsy sides

In clumsy times

Sierras withering

Behind the storefronts

And sanity the roadside weed

Dreams of sports and sportsmanship

In the lucid towns paralyzed

Under the truck tires

Shall we relinquish

Sanity to redeem

Fragments and fragmentary

Histories in the towns and the temperate streets

Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn

The courageous and precarious children

BUT SO AS BY FIRE

The darkness of trees

Guards this life

Of the thin ground

That covers the rock ledge

Among the lanes and magic

Of the Eastern woods

The beauty of silence

And broken boughs

And the homes of small animals

The green leaves

Of young plants

Above the dark green moss

In the sweet smell of rot

The pools and the trickle of freshwater

First life, rotting life

Hidden starry life it is not yet

A mirror

Like our lives

We have gone

As far as is possible

Whose lives reflect light

Like mirrors

One had not thought

To be afraid

Not of shadow but of light

Summon one’s powers

Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2008)