The Green Man

The editors of Poetry magazine have paired the following prose quotations from City Dog: Essays by W.S. Di Piero with this poem:

A city bears an identity pressured into being by those who live and work there but also by externally generated forces, by hearsay and expectation. Visitors say San Francisco is “the most European of American cities,” though no one who lives here knows what that means—a certain familiar style, a speed or mood, or its smallness, I suppose, but even these are bell-jar considerations. The actual place has its own respiratory rhythms, and its breath can be vile. For generations city administrations have been helpless to transform a stretch of Market Street that seems mysteriously and irretrievably lost. West of the dolled-up downtown area—Union Square, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s—the street frays into porn shops, grind houses, army surplus stores, and shop windows stuffed with hundreds of knock-off electronic gadgets. Beyond those, despite the presence of a few tenacious upscale restaurants and antique dealers, Market Street feels edgy and crumbly, listing toward skid row. The man was liquefying before my eyes, his body a runny fuddle of dark bundled clothes and sooty skin. His pud, hanging from open pants, had spread a glistening delta of piss that was almost iridescent in the early evening light. The media this week is making high hosannas to the memory of the recently deceased Ronald Reagan. Great man, great optimist, great communicator. We cling so hard to whatever falsehood will sustain us in our American exceptionalism, that in the media only the odd spoilsport is reminding us that the former president shredded the social safety net and “de-institutionalized” the mentally ill. Images slip and slide. The smiling Gipper, the man with the peacock piss-streak, semi-comatose, a word I learned when my father was dying, his legs in sour bedsheets spread the very same way, as if he’d never stir again, like that Market Street stumblebum, who reminds me of the destitute mother and child whom the hero in Melville’s Redburn sees day after day in a Liverpool alley, until one day he finds them replaced by a pile of lime.