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San Francisco Remembered


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San Francisco Remembered

 

by Philip Schultz

 

In summer the polleny light bounces off the white buildings

& you can see their spines & nerves & where the joints knot.

You've never seen such polleny light. The whole city shining

& the women wearing dresses so thin you could see their wing-tipped hips

& their tall silvery legs alone can knock your eye out.

But this isn't about women. It's about the city of blue waters

& fog so thick it wraps round your legs & leaves glistening trails

along the dark winding streets. Once I followed such a trail

& wound up beside this redheaded woman who looked up & smiled

& let me tell you you don't see smiles like that in Jersey City.

She was wearing a black raincoat with two hundred pockets

& I wanted to put my hands in each one. But forget about her.

I was talking about the fog which steps up & taps your shoulder

like a panhandler who wants bus fare to a joint called The Paradise

& where else could this happen? On Sundays Golden Gate Park

is filled with young girls strolling the transplanted palms

& imported rhododendron beds. You should see the sunset

in their eyes & the sway, the proud sway of their young shoulders.

Believe me, it takes a day or two to recover. Or the trolleys clanking

down the steep hills—why you see legs flashing like mirrors!

Please, Lord, please let me talk about San Francisco. How

that gorilla of a bridge twists in the ocean wind & the earth

turns under your feet & at any moment the whole works can crack

& slip back into the sea like a giant being kicked off his raft

& now, if it's all right, I would like to talk about women…

 

from The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems. © Houghton Mifflin, 2010. Reprinted with permission at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

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It's a cool poem, but I think it's kind of ironic that this is a poem about beautiful women in San Francisco. I didn't think San Francisco was known for that at all. Maybe it's just a poem about a dirty old man in San Francisco?

Shrouded in fog so possibly wearing a raincoat..... :lol:

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I have various connections with SF. I have an ex-wife living not far from Fisherman's Wharf. My current (and final) wife grew up not far from Haight Ashbury. A son-in law is from Santa Rosa, not so far away.

 

We were there for a while in January, me mostly busy at teh annual Math meetings, my wife enjoying the nostalgia. I was pleased to take her to the City Lights, which had eluded her (I think her parents kept her on a pretty short leash approaching the Summer of Love).

 

Still, my enthusiasm really is for the Bay Area as a whole. I spent a few months in Berkeley and spent far more time biking the surrounding hills than roaming the streets of SF. No doubt it is an interesting city.

 

And with all that walking, nobody's getting fat except Mama Cass.

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