Steamer Day Poems

(Note: I admit these really don’t get off the ground, but it’s an idea I may return to later. It’s just an idea for a little volume.)

Here is a page from my notebook about the changing skyline of San Francisco

On Steamer Day -a history poem

2018:

City of cranes

High rise skyline

Sinking in the mud sill

Beloved Babylon of Barbary

What has become of you?

***

1850s:

From Telegraph Hill the lookout

a signal flag is raised

over the sand dunes

across the mud flats in this

god-forsaken place of fleas

Twice a month the steamer comes

with mail on Steamer Day

and up Montgomery from a ramshackle stretch of Market Street

townspeople congregate

knots and eddies crowd about

on Steamer Day

Knuckle by an old steam donkey dozer choking smoke

push past lawyers cads and drays

alert incoming manifest

aboard on Steamer Day

to Long Wharf booming aloud

with intermittent rumbling

as pile drivers

pound down rafts of redwood

out past store ships

Niantic, Apollo

newly planked streets

constant hammering

On quiet sea would it be

letters from a loved one

or news of striking gold…

anything to lift the constant fog

through the dark shimmering gate

aboard the steamship hold

Only the sadly murdered of Happy Valley

(the foundry tenements buried shallow on

the sandlot Mission Road,

sleep, awaiting Judgement Day)

-others await a letter

on Steamer Day

The course of life and death

in the steamship’s narrow hold

our fortunes are never fixed

no intelligence foretold

-no tower no magic lantern on a building high above :

…the garish the gaudy

the precious the vain

The multicolored nonsense in the sky

-No Dancing God of Bullshit on the sixty something floor…

just a side- wheel steamer rolling in

circa 1854.

***

Part 1 rough notebook draft

5/26/18

Sunday: Spring in North Beach a California poem

A simple string becomes the sound of the reed and flute on the air of Washington Square all for the joy of

butterfly and bird and bug

A Monarch butterfly fluttering trumpeting yellow in his great circling,

up to the leaves and all about

like a folded paper fortune-teller

Origami creature of air

folding and unfolding

counting colors of the park

green and blue and yellow in shade

Your fortune now is:

Statue bell and cloud

The trumpeter plays his intervals

and the Chinese fiddle blues

and traffic in languages of

North Beach

Outside the burned out shell of the old workplace on Union

masonry facade blue

sky of midday shines right through

Casual drinkers at Vesuvio

ghost of Bob Kaufman

seminal poet in a poncho and battered hat, outside

I saw you

voice of Gregory Corso

I remember

Where Nana Juana Briones grazed her cows in the 1830s the poets look on

Ferlinghetti arms folded in his doorway City Lights

all the Beat poets milling about to fit into the frame

Washington Square

3 trees

trumpet blues

river of sky wave after wave of cloud

the statue you climbed as a kid

floating

you with your head in the grass

all infinite countless

undefinable things -beautiful -breathing elements

breathing as the trees do

Poet’s words in the leaves of the trees in old North Beach circling

Monarch, I ask you

why, the mind, the literal, the figurative,

Kerouac,

tools of practice

-instead of one perception,

one grasp, one actual thing?

They dug up the time capsule

at the foot of bronze Ben Franklin

and we’re still alive!-

The wordless capsule spinning out thoughts

as all the poets do

Bob Kaufman, is that butterfly you?

6/8/2018

Gold

earth poem (or Some Assembly Required)

They figured out the continents during my lifetime

the drift and scuttle

the cement mixer

of ocean floor spreading

that’s some nice real estate

where they were shooting the cannons

I can see condos

in 1969 during the war

we looked back from the moon

too at the marble destiny green and blue

the sight of it stopped all thought

for sixty seconds

to imagine the first day in the garden.

this place really could use some work-

I can see condos

there at the edge of the blue.

that’s a money pit there though

where Eden was.

***

We walk for a short time

consider longevity

-nice sunset last night

My wife asked about it from across the room.

Well, it’s gold.

6/14/18

Ode on an Ice Plant; a stepped-on sonnet

…or alien species go home

Walk not upon nor weaken the ice plant, she cautioned

Though humble, resplendent, purple imperial

Or the larger, pale yellow strong rooted, ethereal

Encroaching the natives- ice plant takes its portion

Established on hillside, the seaside commanding

With green leaves and tubular, the native grasses excluding

With that dazzling psychedelic color deluding-

And thus the ice plant mega-landscape demanding

So Californians -not to naturalize-might prefer a more bulldozed reproval:

And heed the quieter plea for invasive species removal.

and oh: how my tennis shoes on ice plants go smooshing

I’m not buying the ice plant propaganda those purple plants are pushing.

(3/26/18)

for Tina Heringer

Breathing as the Trees Do

A simple string, the chinese fiddle

the sound of the reed and flute on the air of Washington Square

all for the joy of butterfly and bird and bug