All right.
I'm going to read some love poems.
I'm in love.
I got engaged this summer, after eight years.
It's kind of time.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
I'll read just two more poems, how's that?
Yeah.
I'll read two more poems.
Yeah.
This poem is called "Golden Gate."
And I turned it into an essay, if you
want to read it in prose form.
It's just about getting into an argument with my landlord.
[LAUGHS] in San Francisco, where the rents are, as you
can imagine, absolutely absurd.
"Golden Gate."
I could hear every bit of laughter
passed between the dishwashers of the cafe
I shared a wall with.
And one morning, touching that wall,
felt it give wetly under my hand.
I called my landlord, knowing the apartment above
me was vacant, a space, I gambled,
larger than the one I had, where every piece of furniture
touched.
He surprised me by saying yes.
I could stay there during repairs.
I made my calculations.
You were giving up your perfectly good spot in Denver.
I had a month to convince him to come down on the rent.
I moved my bed up, but left the rest, which
workers covered with a tarp.
When the work was done, I went on squatting
in those bright upstairs rooms.
The windows are unreal, I told you, for weeks,
pestering the landlord.
Every few days going to his house,
walking with him in his garden, trying to explain.
He relented at last, grumpily.
And I moved the rest of my stuff before he
could change his mind.
You came with everything you owned.
And suddenly, we lived together.
That first morning, you noticed a red access ladder
I had missed outside the kitchen window.
And we climbed, one going first, the other handing our coffees
up and clambering after.
And that high, we could see the bell tower at Berkeley,
eucalyptuses in the hills, and traffic careening down
Alcatraz, hint of salt on the wind.
And though we would leave this place too,
and soon, when the rent, despite our pleading,
ratcheted beyond us, if you craned your neck a little,
perched delicately in the distance, no fucking way,
you said, was the Golden Gate stitching the city
to the headlands looming across the Bay.
And we were moved to silence by it,
gripped by a pure, clear idea beyond experience,
and stood a long time, touching shoulders, touching knees.