History

Saturday night’s isness remains, stays
concrete, but this and that
become lesser, paler--
the roofers’
tar spars
with Noe Valley’s Zen Bakery,
dandelion-fresh girls flexing triceps;
runaways beg for smoke, coin,
and the Golden Gate is smothered
by yellow. I crouch to look:
San Francisco is not my city
but every dark night,
without light or car or map,
I climb easily to my cliffy home,
static-filled flat of whiteness.

My unease is worse in the morning:
like the playing of a trumpet
in an empty subway, I hear
Sunday’s Want Ads barking at me
as so many faraway fathers
and the Pacific mistral startle me:
Half Moon Bay is the color of tangerines.
Hungry and penniless, I walk up,
then down, Haight Street,
a dingy heaven for needles and insomniacs
and with lungs bursting, sure
that I’m lost, I stop near the Panhandle
and see what I would never believe:
The Church of St. John Coltrane.

In the alert congregation
saxophones are the witnesses
and “Alabama” is today’s sermon,
a text on child murdering,
and I stand to declare
Why is it 1963, and who is this skinny
and scared boy hunchbacked
not by Ohio’s boredom but
by the southern Sunday sun,
seven years and clawing, with anger,
through blood and soil and ash,
on his hands and knees
through the bombed church’s debris
looking for the bones of four girls,
and tell me who is this old fat man--
fatherless and faithless--now holding
a tiny black hand up
to God’s immaculate public relationship,
blinded by guilt and
a gold many-holed instrument?