Each month, the San Francisco Public Library Web site, www.sfpl.org, will feature selected poems reflecting the theme of War and Peace on Our Streets.
To submit a poem or for more information about the project, see our News Release.
October Working Poet:
Tony D’Arpino
Tony D’Arpino’s poetry has appeared many places including The BloomsburyReview, Branches, Crossconnect, Pavement Saw, Storyboard (University of Guam), and The Xavier Review.
He has forthcoming work in Wild Violet, Bay Nature, and The Blue Bottle Project (Smiling Dog Press) in which the poems will be published in sealed bottles and set afloat. An excerpt from his novel “St. Bonaventure's Island” is forthcoming in Terra Incognita (Madrid).
San Francisco
by Tony D’Arpino
“and if this isn't love it's shit” d.a. levy
San Francisco is the terror of a lost star, breathing dust in shattered rooms of the
presence.
It's the curve in the North Beach freeway, dedicated to the sorcery of wind.
It's Portsmouth Square where firecrackers mark time in tao-step for me nearby
office workers in their financial windmills.
It's fantastic mystical cafes and bars that might not exist anymore.
It's some of these words in a cityscape, rising voices, songs in praise of
darkness.
San Francisco is a beautitude of sewers and laughter, a warm race of spiritual
hedonists.
It's a beatitude of bridges and gulls with a cold heart of capital.
It's mountain people and forest folk selling songs and food, while kids on
transparent skateboards practice geomancy and karate voice.
It's Irish cops and coffee and multi-ethnic crooners with stiletto coke spoons in
Cuban heels.
It's the US Immigration office on Sansome Street.
It's a pack of gulls reeling sanely above a Fillmore schoolyard.
It's the Filipino Vampire of the Spirit, and El Tecolote, and the Shadow's
shadow.
San Francisco is the Caesar's Palace of duende.
II
“At the end of our streets the stars” -George Sterling
?Que sera San Francisco?
It's the labor strike waterfront where the ships Satumo and Cosmos once sailed
from Uruguay.
It's Louise writing a long novel in painstaking notebooks - at the beginning it
was made of words and at the end of meaningless scrawls.
It's the memory of a poem by Borges or Parra or Kaufinan or Sinisgalli recited
in a Southern voice.
San Francisco is the next street, the one I've never seen.
San Francisco is bright air with cool and little parasols of fog.
It's some trees like a minor poetry of uncursed meetings.
It's inversion, conversion, and reversion of the participating rainbows, a
confusion of shadows and steps,
It's the green-white youngest port on the trembling goddess rim of me West.
San Francisco is a Montreal of the spirit come home after a clear blue morning.
It's a dancehall sound strung far out on the headlands on a golden chord of
breathing.
It's Ocean Beach in dreamtime with wild dogs and bonfires and the gypsy lady
on a three-legged stool.
It's the skyline seen from a window in the hills, beyond the glowing bar of the
Bay.
(Previously published The Shape of the Stone (chapbook- Deep Forest Press, San Francisco- 1990.)
