Some San Francisco Poems: Sections 5-10

5 THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS Combed thru the piers the wind Moves in the clever city Not in the doors but the hinges Finds the secret of motion As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices,   murmurs Flaws In the wind Fear        fear At the lumber mastheads And fetched a message out of the sea again Say angel                say powers Obscurely   ‘things And the self’ Prosody Sings In the stones to entrust To a poetry of statement At close quarters A living mind ‘and that one’s own’ what then             what spirit Of the bent seas Archangel of the tide brimming in the moon-streak comes in whose absence earth crumbles 6 Silver as The needle’s eye Of the horizon in the noise Of their entrance row on row the waves Move landward        conviction’s Net of branches In the horde of events the sacred swarm avalanche Masked in the sunset Needle after needle more numerous than planets Or the liquid waves In the tide rips We believe       we believe Beyond the cable car streets And the picture window Lives the glittering crumbling night Of obstructions and the stark structures That carry wires over the mountain One writes in the presence of something Moving close to fear I dare pity no one Let the rafters pity The air in the room Under the rafters Pity In the continual sound Are chords Not yet struck Which will be struck Nevertheless yes 7 O withering seas Of the doorstep and local winds unveil The face of art Carpenter, plunge and drip in the sea Art’s face We know that face More blinding than the sea    a haunted house    a limited Consensus unwinding Its powers Toward the thread’s end In the record of great blows   shocks Ravishment   devastation   the wood splintered The keyboard gone in the rank grass swept her hand Over the strings and the thing rang out Over the rocks and the ocean Not my poem   Mr Steinway’s Poem   Not mine   A ‘marvelous’ object Is not the marvel of things twisting the new Mouth   forcing the new Tongue   But it rang 8 THE TASTE Old ships are preserved For their queer silence of obedient seas Their cutwaters floating in the still water With their cozy black iron work And Swedish seamen dead    the cabins Hold the spaces of their deaths And the hammered nails of necessity Carried thru the oceans Where the moon rises grandly In the grandeur of cause We have a taste for bedrock Beneath this spectacle To gawk at Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid Has covered them, a black splintering Under the eyes of young wives People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind At every summit Our overcoats trip us Running for the bus Our arms stretched out In a wind from what were sand dunes 9 THE IMPOSSIBLE POEM Climbing the peak of Tamalpais the loose Gravel underfoot And the city shining with the tremendous wrinkles In the hills and the winding of the bay Behind it, it faces the bent ocean Streetcars Rocked thru the city and the winds Combed their clumsy sides In clumsy times Sierras withering Behind the storefronts And sanity the roadside weed Dreams of sports and sportsmanship In the lucid towns paralyzed Under the truck tires Shall we relinquish Sanity to redeem Fragments and fragmentary Histories in the towns and the temperate streets Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn The courageous and precarious children 10 BUT SO AS BY FIRE The darkness of trees Guards this life Of the thin ground That covers the rock ledge Among the lanes and magic Of the Eastern woods The beauty of silence And broken boughs And the homes of small animals The green leaves Of young plants Above the dark green moss In the sweet smell of rot The pools and the trickle of freshwater First life,   rotting life Hidden starry life it is not yet A mirror Like our lives We have gone As far as is possible Whose lives reflect light Like mirrors One had not thought To be afraid Not of shadow but of light Summon one’s powers