A couple more.
All right.
Let's see.
All right.
So this one connects to that Father's Day poem that I read.
And I didn't consciously decide that, oh, yeah, I
need to write all these poems about my dad.
But although he wasn't a physical presence
for very much in my life.
He was like a mental presence, who was always there.
So "Another Portrait of Dad."
"I saw dad sitting on the porch of the rooming
house at 6 Street, San Jose.
Leaning back in a ratty chair with a tall can in his hand.
He hadn't shaved or cut his hair in months.
I saw him before he saw me staring off
at some distant point.
When he fixed on my face as I crossed the yellow lawn,
he recognized me and grinned.
I saw Mario Ybarra standing in the center line
of Sunset Boulevard at dusk.
Between lines of streaming traffic,
I yelled, hey, Mario, driving by.
But I don't think he heard me.
I saw Selene Santiago at the Alhambra farmers market.
And when I turned around, she was gone.
In a warm summer drizzle in Manhattan, somebody said,
I heard someone call your name.
I stepped off the corner at the corner of 5th and 34th,
and looked up and down the Avenue, between skyscrapers
and the crowd.
Emerging through corridors of plywood and scaffolding.
Flowing across intersections in four directions,
and recognized no one.
At the Public Theater in Manhattan,
on my way to see Roger Guenver Smith's solo play, A Huey
Newton Story, I got in the elevator and Roger entered.
Hey, Roger, I said.
And he said, how are you?
Jimmy Lew had been a runner in high school,
and now on the trail to Vernal Falls
at dawn in the Yosemite Valley, he rushed ahead of me.
I hurried to keep up.
Breathing hard, lungs aching in frozen air.
Trying to keep him in sight as he zigzagged the icy
trail above.
My brother told me that the last time he
saw Zeus Gaytan he was on TV wearing
the blue helmet of a union--
of a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia.
The last time I saw him was in the 1980s
in the Japanese garden on top of the New Otani Hotel,
talking about people we never saw.
I had the wife and kids in the pickup truck.
We visited one of my wife's college friends
who was working as a public defender in San Jose.
Then we drove downtown to 6th Street
where my father lived in a rooming house.
He didn't have a phone.
He didn't know we were in town.
One of the boarders whose name was maybe Kevin,
that he mentioned in his letters,
said my father was out.
But he'd tell him that we came by.
My wife and maybe we could--
my wife said, maybe we could return
to see if he was in later.
And as I turned to get back in the truck,
my father crossed the street and met us.
He was drunk and he looked like he
hadn't slept at home in days.
In fact, he said he spent the week across town
with the Indians.
I could see him trying to shake off the drunkenness,
get a grip on himself internally.
Just a minute, he said, walking over to vomit in the shrubbery.
Are you all right?
I said.
I just need a cup of coffee, he said.
And it was true.
He heated coffee on the stove in the tiny kitchen.
Drank 2 cups and was ready to meet the grandchildren.
I saw Harry Gamboa in the Fremont Avenue, Alhambra
Starbucks as I entered.
And he saw me and rose to say hello.
I saw Harry in the Mexico City Starbucks off the zocalo.
Dad grew angry when we said, we all
have to be quiet because the kids are going to bed.
I've never been treated this so badly in my life,
he said, he exclaimed as he stalked down the stairs.
A 12 pack in a sack under his arm.
The first time I saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I was walking towards City Lights Bookstore
and he was outside arranging books in the window.
I saw Rick Harsch sitting on my balcony smoking
and drinking a beer, emitting anxious smoke, like my brother.
I saw a raven clucking and burbling
in the tree in Yosemite Creek.
Later a raven, maybe the same one,
was taking a dust bath in the road.
I saw Ernesto Cardenal under the leaves
in the fairgrounds in Managua where
we went for the first International Book Fair.
The US booth consisted of a consortium of small presses.
Children's Book Press of San Francisco.
CALYX Press of Oregon.
Curbstone Press out of Connecticut.
West End Press out of Albuquerque.
The Cubans and Mexicans had big booths the next aisle over.
Across the aisle directly facing the US stall, and its shelves
and tables, were Iranians with giant laminated photographs
of dead torture victims of the US supported SAVAK,
hung like sheets on a line next door to the North Koreans
with their immaculate white booth that
housed one shelf of books, the collected works of Kim Il-sung.
Sandinista Minister of Culture Cardenal
toured the stalls saying hello.
I thanked him for hosting us and especially
for his own poetry, which I said was crucially important to me.
And later I met Cardenal's British translator
who said his books only sold a few hundred copies in the US.
On the flat Sea of Cortez the broad back
of a whale, a blue whale broke the surface
like the inverted black steel hull of a ship.
Black, and smooth, and shining with a nub on the crest line
down the center as it arched its back and swam on.
I saw Carlo Pedace sitting on my sister's back porch smoking.
We first met Carlo in Naples in '78, and now his hair was gray.
But he looked good.
Three generations of distant family gathered around him.
But he was thinking of something else.
He looked like he was waiting.
I saw my grandmother, Alberta Northway, sitting on her couch
alone in her apartment in Santa Barbara.
In the airport, in Philadelphia, I saw my coworker
Dr. Joe Cocozza enter the line behind me
and he introduced me to his partner.
I saw Allen at the table of professors
with Karen Yamashita.
I walked into the cafe looking for lunch
when Robert Allen started talking about the Port Chicago
mutiny and explosion.
I told him, Robert, we met in Nicaragua 20 years ago.
And we laughed and hugged.
He had talked about the 1944 Port Chicago explosion
and mutiny case 20 years earlier in Nicaragua.
I learned about Port Chicago from you, I said.
In fact, you're the only person who talks about it.
I saw Willie Herron walking down the hill on Eastern Avenue
by the Dolores Canning Company toward Floral.
I saw the yucca spike was a golden blonde,
its seed pods rattling like earrings halfway
between the reptilian green of its emergence,
and the last desiccated hollow black stalk it would become."
Was that good, y'all?
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all for coming.
Thanks again to the Poetry Center for having me,
for breaking me out of pandemic jail.
And I get to see real people.