Some San Francisco Poems: Sections 1-4
By George Oppen
1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
Be
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
Copyright Credit: George Oppen, “Some San Francisco Poems” from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 1972 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2008)