We know some things, man, about some
things, Bob Kaufman said, strutting down
another San Francisco street on his way
from there to whatever’s here. His pockets
were turned out to their linty parts
like a magician’s mid-trick. He had a dull
pencil tucked between his ear
& his preternatural Afro. I followed,
up roller-coaster hills, past misbegotten
alley kisses, hummingbirds everywhere
hitchhike-thumbing California’s daylight.
Bob Kaufman loved San Francisco’s
gentle malaise, long views of bay
& insistent bridge, the ocean right after.
I’m from Indiana, where dirt roads
lead to other dirt roads that always
lead to fields of blondly tasselled stalks
wafted by local infidelities. When
the wind kicks up, crops stammer secrets
recklessly as the gnats cloud in buggy
doubts above those lazy farmers in repose.
Just like the poets in San Francisco—
chez lounging-it in silk kimonos
for their gorgeous, sun-slicked photos.
Everyone stays skyward out here.
Just then, Bob Kaufman turned
a corner in his own quick reverie
& started up & down the coronary hills
of a city everyone talks about but nobody
can afford to love. Not like my home town
of Indianapolis, where four skyscrapers
stand affordably in the center of your wallet’s
imagination. They subsidize everybody’s
big ideas while the penthouse couple
fishes for a third for their kinky party.
There’s even a cuck chair in their bedroom
where the husband watches his wife
being ravished. Indy can be just as fantastic
& horny as San Francisco or Paris at times.
For a time, Bob Kaufman was the most
famous poet in France—bigger than Verlaine
or the pirate Rimbaud. But in San Francisco,
during his ten years of silence,
he was wrong-eyed & woebegone.
He stayed silent & alone as if not naming
the words ricocheting in his ears could
sustain him while passersby side-eyed
him up & down—his hobo couture, street
sleeping, all those paper-bag manifestos.
This is drawn from “Be Easy: New and Selected Poems.”
