Sunday Poetry: The Inheritance

"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes." ~Joseph Roux

The Inheritance

D.H. Lawrence

SINCE you did depart

Out of my reach, my darling,

Into the hidden,

I see each shadow start

With recognition, and I

Am wonder-ridden.

I am dazed with the farewell,

But I scarcely feel your loss.

You left me a gift

Of tongues, so the shadows tell

Me things, and silences toss

Me their drift.

You sent me a cloven fire

Out of death, and it burns in the draught

Of the breathing hosts,

Kindles the darkening pyre

For the sorrowful, till strange brands waft

Like candid ghosts.

Form after form, in the streets

Waves like a ghost along,

Kindled to me;

The star above the house-top greets

Me every eve with a long

Song fierily.

All day long, the town

Glimmers with subtle ghosts

Going up and down

In a common, prison-like dress;

But their daunted looking flickers

To me, and I answer, Yes!

So I am not lonely nor sad

Although bereaved of you,

My little love.

I move among a kinsfolk clad

With words, but the dream shows through

As they move.

Wake Me Up In San Francisco...

"One day if I go to heaven...I’ll look around and say “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco”. 

-Herb Caen

You ever get the feeling some places are just, well, magic?

Chicago in the summertime, when all the glorious concrete cracks are showing and nobody cares.

New Orleans in late afternoon, when it's so hot the only sane thing to do is have another drink.

New York past midnight, when one minute you're walking down a dark and deserted alley, and the next you're in the 24-Hour Technicolor Oz that is Times Square.

San Francisco... anytime.

I don't know those other cities. I've drifted through them, a traveler at best, a tourist at worst. One of the first things you're told as a writer is to write what you know.

I know San Francisco.

I didn't always. Just a few years ago, I actually thought going to "The City" was a pain. I don't live there. The drive in was okay until about King Street. After that... chaos. Traffic, jaywalkers, one-way streets, hills of Everestian proportions- it's a miracle I survived those early trips. It's even more of a miracle I kept going back.

But go back I did, and little by little, the place grew on me. I learned how to slip in unnoticed, which streets made a modicum of sense, how to parallel-park at a ninety-degree angle (okay, not really- that one still scares the piss out of me. Insider tip: curb your wheels). I found some great places to eat, and made a few friends.

Magic can be quiet at first.

Every city has its ghosts, but San Francisco's are so close to the surface you almost feel like you could sit down with them and have coffee--an organic, fair-trade, artisanal roast, of course. History isn't just history there. San Francisco is a city of layers. Literally.

During recent excavations for a new downtown subway system, trash heaps were discovered dating back to the area's first Ohlone settlements. Symbols marking the long-defunct electric and telegraph lines can still be found on Market Street. A few blocks down, a Dogpatch park festers quietly as a monument to the bygone days of punk. Head the opposite direction to Chinatown and take a pleasant stroll down Ross Alley, once the most infamous street on the Barbary Coast.

Magical.

There are monsters, too. It's not difficult to picture The Haight as a witch's stomping ground, not a stretch to imagine vampires stalking Marina co-eds as they stumble home after last call. A boat trip out to the Farallon Islands might reveal a wayward mermaid fighting for its life amid the sharks.

Most of San Francisco's monsters tend to be of the human variety, however. Certain names still echo through the ether: Milk. Capone. Jim Jones had a congregation on Fillmore. The Zodiac Killer still sends chills down the spines of those who remember.

San Francisco is good at forgetting.

I'm still a stranger in this town. I don't have the same perspective, the same love-hate relationship with it that locals do. I'll never have a neighborhood market within walking distance of my apartment. Muni routes are a mystery to me. I don't have to pay a cool $3k a month to live in a broom closet because of those GODDAMN TECH YUPPIES AND THEIR FUCKING GOOGLE HOUSING SUBSIDIES.

I'm an outsider, a fact I'm constantly, almost painfully, aware of.

But while I'm not a local, I'm not quite a tourist, either. I've done "the knowledge." I know how to get from the freeway to the waterfront, and from there how to get to North Beach. And once I get to North Beach, I have this great little Italian place where the staff actually know me and my husband. Every time we visit, they exclaim over how big our son is getting.

Next door to that little restaurant is an empty lot. Its original inhabitant was a small Orthodox cathedral, destroyed in the 1906 Quake/Fire. For years afterward it was the site of a vaudeville theater. Now it houses an extraction shaft for the subway project I mentioned earlier.

Said shaft may or may not have a ghost problem.

Not quite a local. Not quite a tourist. Now when I go to San Francisco, I go as a writer.

Like I said. Magic.

Sunday Poetry: Wraith

"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes." ~Joseph Roux

Wraith
 Edna St. Vincent Millay

"THIN Rain, whom are you haunting,
That you haunt my door?"
--Surely it is not I she's wanting;
Someone living here before--
"Nobody's in the houe but me:
You may come in if you like and see."

Thin as thread, with exquisite fingers--
Have you seen her, any of you?
Grey shawl, and leaning on the wind,
And the garden showing through?

Glimmering eyes--and silent, mostly,
Sort of a whisper, sort of a purr,
Asking something, asking it over,
If you get a sound from her.--

Ever see her, any of you?
Strangest thing I've ever known--
Every night since I moved in,
And I came to be alone.

"Thin Rain, hush with your knocking!
You may not come in!
This is I that you hear rocking;
Nobody's with me, nor has been!"

Curious, how she tried the window--
Odd, the way she tries the door--
Wonder just what sort of people
Could have had this house before ...

Sunday Poetry: The Haunted Palace

"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes." ~Joseph Roux

The Haunted Palace
Edgar Allan Poe

In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion—
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow,
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago),
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically,
To a lute's well-tunëd law,
Bound about a throne where, sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

And travelers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh—but smile no more.

Sunday Poetry: Ghost In The Land Of Skeletons

"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes." -Joseph Roux

Ghost in the Land of Skeletons
Christopher Kennedy

If not for flesh’s pretty paint, we’re just a bunch of skeletons, working hard to deny the fact of bones. Teeth remind me that we die. That’s why I never smile, except when looking at a picture of a ghost, captured by a camera lens, in a book about the paranormal. When someone takes a picture of a spirit, it gives me hope. I admire the ones who refuse to go away. Lovers scorned and criminals burned. I love the dead little girl who plays in her yard, a spectral game of hide and seek. It’s the fact they don’t know they’re dead that appeals to me most. Like a man once said to me, Do you ever feel like you’re a ghost? Sure, I answered, every day. He laughed at that and disappeared. All I could think was he beat me to it.