Some San Francisco Poems: Sections 1-4

Moving over the hills, crossing the irrigation

canals perfect and profuse in the mountains the

streams of women and men walking under the high-

tension wires over the brown hills

in the multiple world of the fly’s

multiple eye the songs they go to hear on

this occasion are no one’s own

Needle’s eye needle eye but in the ravine

again and again on the massive spike the song

clangs

as the tremendous volume of the music takes

over obscured by their long hair they seem

to be mourning

A MORALITY PLAY: PREFACE

Lying full length

On the bed in the white room

Turns her eyes to me

Again,

Naked . .

Never to forget her naked eyes

Beautiful and brave

Her naked eyes

Turn inward

Feminine light

The unimagined

Feminine light

Feminine ardor

Pierced and touched

Tho all say

Huddled among each other

‘Love’

The play begins with the world

A city street

Leads to the bay

Tamalpais in cloud

Mist over farmlands

Local knowledge

In the heavy hills

The great loose waves move landward

Heavysided in the wind

Grass and trees bent

Along the length of coast in the continual wind

The ocean pounds in her mind

Not the harbor leading inward

To the back bay and the slow river

Recalling flimsy Western ranches

The beautiful hills shine outward

Sunrise the raw fierce fire

Coming up past the sharp edge

And the hoof marks on the mountain

Shines in the white room

Provincial city

Not alien enough

To naked eyes

This city died young

You too will be shown this

You will see the young couples

Leaving again in rags

So with artists. How pleasurable

to imagine that, if only they gave

up their art, the children would be

healed, would live.

Irving Younger in The Nation

‘AND THEIR WINTER AND NIGHT IN DISGUISE’

The sea and a crescent strip of beach

Show between the service station and a deserted shack

A creek drains thru the beach

Forming a ditch

There is a discarded super-market cart in the ditch

That beach is the edge of a nation

There is something like shouting along the highway

A California shouting

On the long fast highway over the California mountains

Point Pedro

Its distant life

It is impossible the world should be either good or bad

If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful

If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good

It is as remarkable in one case as the other

As against this

We have suffered fear, we know something of fear

And of humiliation mounting to horror

The world above the edge of the foxhole belongs to the

flying bullets, leaden superbeings

For the men grovelling in the foxhole danger, danger in

being drawn to them

These little dumps

The poem is about them

Our hearts are twisted

In dead men’s pride

Dead men crowd us

Lean over us

In the emplacements

The skull spins

Empty of subject

The hollow ego

Flinching from the war’s huge air

Tho we are delivery boys and bartenders

We will choke on each other

Minds may crack

But not for what is discovered

Unless that everyone knew

And kept silent

Our minds are split

To seek the danger out

From among the miserable soldiers

ANNIVERSARY POEM

‘the picturesque

common lot’ the unwarranted light

Where everyone has been

The very ground of the path

And the litter grow ancient

A shovel’s scratched edge

So like any other man’s

We are troubled by incredulity

We are troubled by scratched things

Becoming familiar

Becoming extreme

Let grief

So it be ours

Nor hide one’s eyes

As tides drop along the beaches in the thin wash of

breakers

And so desert each other

—lest there be nothing

The Indian girl walking across the desert, the

sunfish under the boat

How shall we say how this happened, these stories, our

stories

Scope, mere size, a kind of redemption

Exposed still and jagged on the San Francisco hills

Time and depth before us, paradise of the real, we

know what it is

To find now depth, not time, since we cannot, but depth

To come out safe, to end well

We have begun to say good bye

To each other

And cannot say it

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