There's a poem that I must share with you
because it is a poem for which I am justly famous.
It's called "The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive."
And I wrote this poem some years ago
and I did not submit it for publication.
For many years I kept it to myself because I--
I don't know for what reason.
But I didn't publish it and I read it.
But I read it on numerous occasions.
I would come before audiences and I would read this poem
and it became an underground poem.
And then finally I would get up on the podium like this
and I would start reading poems and somebody in the audience
would raise his hand and say, but what about the Buffalo
poem.
And so it had a life--
an underground kind of life of its own for many years.
And then finally, I did allow it to be
published which may or may not have been a good idea.
But I have to tell you about how it came to be.
For many years I lived in San Francisco.
I lived in the Marina at the intersection
of Beach and Fillmore.
And if you know about San Francisco,
the Marina is a lovely area which is down next to--
right on the Bay and it's between the Fisherman's Wharf
and the Golden Gate Bridge.
And Fillmore Street, Fillmore--
Fillmore is a great Boulevard actually, a very wide street
which crosses San Francisco north to south
and it runs into the Bay.
And when I went to Stanford, I drove to Stanford once or twice
a week and I would go up Fillmore Street from the Marina
through Cow Hollow up to the top of Pacific Heights, which
is the intersection of Fillmore and Broadway
and then out onto the freeway down to Stanford.
I did this so many times and always
as I was driving up Fillmore Street I would glory
in looking in the rearview mirror
because you see down Fillmore this wonderful site
of the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge Alcatraz.
Sausalito beyond it's one of the great views in the world.
And I took it for granted for such a long time.
And then one day as I was driving up Fillmore Street
and as I was approaching the top of Pacific Heights,
my imagination went wild.
I caught this glimpse in the rearview mirror of the Bay
below me and the Golden Gate Bridge
in this wonderful, wonderful panorama.
And I thought to myself, what a great place for a buffalo
drive.
And then I imagined that one day the good citizens
of San Francisco should be awakened by a sound they
had never heard before.
They go out onto their balconies,
they see this great cloud of dust
rising above the peninsula, they hear this bawling
and the thunder of hooves.
And this is a lost remnant of the great southern herd,
maybe 5,000 animals moving into the city of San Francisco.
They come into the city; they knock the corners
off buildings; they trample automobiles;
they knock light posts down along the way;
they take the line of least resistance,
which is of course Venus Avenue; they move through the city.
At Broadway they hang a left.
They move up to the top of Pacific Heights,
the intersection of Broadway and Fillmore.
And there on the Southwest corner of that intersection
is an old man on an old horse waving a red chief's blankets.
And he diverts them down Fillmore Street
and into the Bay.
Are you with me?
How is that for an act of the imagination?
So I wrote this poem, "The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive."
"Insinuate the sun through fog.
Upon Pacific Heights, upon the man on horseback,
upon the herd ascending, there is color and clamor.
There he waves them down, those great humpbacked animals.
Until their wild grace gone, they lumber
and lunge and blood blisters at their teeth and their hooves
score the street.
And among boulders they settle on the sea.
He looks after them twisted round
upon his sorrow, the drape of his flag
now full and formal, ceremonial.
One bull, animal representation of the sun,
he dreams back from the brink to the green refuge
of his hunter's heart.
It grazes near a canyon wall, along a ribbon of light,
among redbud trees, eventually into shadow.
Then the hold of his eyes is broken.
On the farther rim, the grasses flicker and blur.
A hawk brushes rain across the dusk.
Meadows recede into mountains, and here
and there are moons, like salmonberries
upon the glacial face of the sky."
That may be my greatest poem, but it's hard to say.