SAN FRANCISCO POEM
Formerly OF A SHINING CITY ON A HILL
a.k.a. THAT DAMNED SILLY SAN FRANCISCO POEM
For Jerry Lewis
And me walking around like I'm the ace in the hole,
here in vaunted Frisco
o, city of rugged footgear
city of trolleys and wharves
city of dykes and dwarves
o city of remembrances long gone
city of cramped quarters and dirty fables
city of petty concerns and Herculean tasks
city loved and hated
by everyone who's ever been here
from the stony commuters and the gypped tourists
to the grinning Union streetcleaners
to the growling scowling stock analysts
to this jaded poet scuffling the berg at street level
killing time between breakfast and lunch
looking for Nirvana in this confusion of architecture
and intentions both good and cruel.
So, San Francisco, you're worth something after all:
you've gone and got a poem out of me.
To hell with you, San Fransisco,
your Chinatown fair and your Anchor Steam beer,
your peopled streets and painted ladies,
your bankers and bums,
your hills and your vistas.
Maybe I'm the real freak in this stoned out town,
looking for laughter an praying for rain
on a gray October morning
undestined to bloom.
(At The Rock I had almost got it:
The shining city across the bay
with this stone lain at its feet, a tribute
useful only as a prison.
The nervous, preening, giggling, unwashed tourists heralded
the unmaking of history: the awful place
was really not that bad, it's inmates
well fed and reasonably clean, and you had to wonder
If the asylum was across the bay, not in it.)
Something hard about this place, something beat on the rocks, something
washed in the surf. No. As we toured
the land of mad monks and screaming incelibates
scrubbed clean and presented for posterity
I figured maybe something of myth and remembrance,
of rosemary and thyme,
An offering to the Gods? Again, no.
What makes this place so tough?
I have plumbed the depths, I have scaled the heights,
I should be able to figure this out. Something must be wrong here.
Very, very wrong.
But everything I pluck out, the cheap abundance, the clapboard palaces,
the hard-scrabble millionaires in their boxes on the hill
fashioned of imported chintz and cut-rate deal,
this is the excess and the economy
I am on the record as being in favor of.
Everything that is not expressly prohibited here
is permitted, which is how I like it. The mundane mythology
of the Barbary Coast is still alive in this drunken sailor of a town,
this loaded dowager of a town, this blue-blooded, bejeweled bitch of a town
where the winds load the hillsides with seasalt
and the night chill strikes the insects from the air.
This place built on lies and dead Chinamen, this place
of the insane, by the insane, and for the insane.
Maybe do I get it. It's distraction of the place,
this place that turns slowly like a cog in a machine;
the sheer exertion
of getting around on these goddamned hills
is enough to keep everyone reasonably moral.
Everything else is just window dressing in comparison.
Oh, city of hauling trolleys over hills,
city of bankers and tourists,
oh, city of poet-landlords, to hell with you?
To hell with me! And here I am
walking around like my feet don't stink
like some kind of beknighted scientist
just about to figure everything out.
Just a tourist in denial,
just relax, Jack
have a sandwich, have a beer,
let the poet be pretentious, let the playwright be a queer.
Sometimes you just gotta figure
that there isn't anything to figure out.
Nothing wrong, nothing right,
no race to run, no foe to fight,
San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco,
I love ya. Amen.