Marcy Sheiner and Neeli Cherkovski
Oakland Methadone Clinic
Sunday Morning 8 a.m.
by Marcy Sheiner
Jackie is a star.
Today she is the star
wearing children's party pink
round her naked brown shoulders
though it's raining out
and cold.
Jackie's hair is pink
and hatless too—
a brazen sign of freedom:
she's shaken off the man
who kept her covered.
Jackie calls my name
sounding loud and childlike.
I look up from studying the floor.
“Lana died,” she says
taking my hand in hers
searching my face for resolution.
We embrace. What else to do?
Standing in the center
while the line snakes around her
Jackie tells the story of the death.
Unconsciously she twirls
pulls the stole up to her chin;
her eyes are wide
and fragile as a girl's.
It's not much of a tale
from her place in Lana's life
but the line's slow today
so people listen.
I turn away and think of Lana
but I'm diverted by one of “my” people:
gaunt, shaggy hair, a Deadhead shirt.
We smile some ancient tribal code:
we can't help it.
Some Sunday morning
twenty thirty years ago
we'd be smokin' dope
and listening to our prophets
blissfully ignorant of
this day
this place
this time.
If you were Keith Richards, I think,
you'd be having your blood cleansed
down in the hills of Beverly now
and were I Grace Slick I'd have been
Betty Forded long ago.
Being who we are, tho,
we just shuffle forward
up to the window
in the 14th Street Clinic
swallow the dose
walk back outside.
The sound of Jackie's disbelief
trails me out the door:
she's telling someone else
that Lana died.
SAN FRANCISCO PLACES
for Michael Hennessey
by Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski, author of six books of poetry, is currently completing his novel, ANGEL'S FLIGHT, an autobiography of the inner mind.
He is the author of WHITMAN'S WILD CHILDREN (Lapis, 1989), FERLINGHETTI (Doubleday, 1979) and HANK: THE LIFE OF CHARLES BUKOWSKI (Random House, 1991).
the houses lean up against Bernal Hill
where the fog rarely huddles, but you can feel
its Irish Chinese Sicilian Philipino Russian
Japanese French Black Mexican roots
multi-ethnic fog covers the churchyard
at the old Mission where the dead Spaniards
speak Mandarin, Asian-American teenagers
crowd the racks on Broadway in North Beach
looking at the magazines, a derelict philosopher
drops his bottle of sloe gin in the alley
between City Lights and Vesuvio, it has to be
Vietnam or the Desert War, we feel the tremor
nightly, Carol Doda's neon body
astoundingly awake at 2 a.m. Broadway
and Columbus, silent troops in the morning
heading for the Financial District, nothing but
rain, that's how it was way back
in the 70s, the last copter leaves the compound
in Saigon, no more wild astonished militarized eyes
on Market Street enticed to spend
a little money, to find anonymous sex, to feel
like home, to seize what soldiers always sought
in cities on the coast, to pretend it's a carnival
not a carnivore that rules, and then
it's a shadow crossing a shadow
we were lost on the Barbary Coast
we ran with the vigilante gangs, the code
of fire and catastrophic sea stories, shanghaied
boys from the middle states, French
settlers who built their vineyards in stone
and brick, a music of a city
a symphony of a poem
a rooming house of retired seafarers and
longshoremen, a street for hard-fisted
union bosses, a street for formidable captains
of silver and iron, of steel and
plundered redwood, a cup of coffee
in the morning where the statue of Saint
Francis no longer reigns. Red's Java House
to Starbuck's automated imitation
of a dream is a leap we may not cherish
but you say it's not a city
quite like other cities, it's a strange cliche
yet our leaders are protected
by the Donner myth
you'll starve to death
if you don't devour your neighbor
but we are lost inside of the labyrinth
of neighborhoods and hills, steep streets
dream down our throats, it's not Chicago the
Hog Butcher, not New York, an Andy Warhol
super-imposition of Jackie 0 on paper
not New Orleans jazz or the Blues in St. Louis
never L.A.'s blue freeway prairie land and glitz, it's
chianti, sake, rice wine
French bread and the poem
of a luminous dream called community
