Category Archives: I Speak of the City

[I’m coming to this poem not as a fan of Ezra Pound or necessarily of Modernism but as a someone who hates the subway.

As a true Citizen, I know the City won’t function without mass transit; you might as well place a tourniquet on the City’s main artery and walk away. But with most things we can’t live without, it’s hard as hell to live with it. The overcrowding, delays, loud conversations, bad music, foul body odor, and that’s just the waiting platform. Once inside the car, you can amp up all the previous annoyance factors and add in claustrophobia and motion sickness to the list.

No wonder Pound remains to stay in the station, focusing her energies not on the train but the people around him. Not static faces, since that would indicate staring–a strict no-no in any City, but the “apparitions” around him. He’s trapped with bodies he will see again and never know, a Modernist’s dream. And where does he take all this, as far as he can away from there back to nature. Depending on the station you frequent, it could be miles up past bedrock or just within reach on an el by a park but distance doesn’t matter in poems. Or in the City if you have a fast enough train, you just have to put all the ugliness and people to the side.]

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

© Ezra Pound

[Most of my City memories involve roadtrippin’ with some homies and after hours of repetitive music (think back to the days of casette decks, y’all), bad radio (sometimes all you can pick up is the Gospel station), and getting on each other’s nerves (sometime Mom jaokes go just a little bit too far) finally seeing the highway marker that tells us we’re close. From there it’s a countdown of miles and minutes till the lights of the City come into focus and, at that point, every city is pure possibility.

This Garrett Hongo poem captures all that and more. It’s about bromance and Americana and claiming what you know is yours. And like the long stretch of road that just seems to get longer the closer you approach it, this poem extends the experience, turns arrival into ritual, and does it with such lyricism that you feel that you hit the best part of the mixtape, tuned into the good Soul station, and all you hear is the infectious laughter of jokes amongst boys.]

Cruising 99
for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong Lau

I.

A Porphyry of Elements

Starting in a long swale between the Sierras
    and the Coast Range,
Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea,
Starting from exposed granite bedrock,
From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn,
    and scuffed by wind,
Tired of the extremes of temperature,
    the weather’s wantonness,
Starting from the survey of a condor’s eye
Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon,
Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta,
    a head of white hair,
    a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian,
Starting from the death of the last grizzly,
The final conversion of Tulare County
    to the internal-combustion engine,
Staring from California oak and acorn,
    scrubgrass, rivermist,
    and lupine in the foothills,
From days driving through the outfield clover
    of Modesto in a borrowed Buick,
From nights drinking pitchers of dark
    in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill,
From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves,
    and a pisspot hat,
From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville,
From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin,
From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento,
From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon,
From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay,
    limestone, water, and tar,
From a need or desire to throw your money away
    in The Big City,
From a melting of history and space in the crucible
    of an oil-stained hand—
Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements,
    this aggregate of experiences
Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone
    of memory and vision,
Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye
    for straight, unending lines,
We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine!

II.

A Samba for Inada

Let’s go camping
Let’s go chanting
Let’s go cruising
Let’s go boozing

Let’s go smoke
Let’s go folk
Let’s go rock
Let’s go bop

Let’s go jazz
Let’s go fast
Let’s go slow
Let’s go blow

Let’s go Latin
Let’s go cattin
Let’s go jiving
Let’s go hiding

Let’s go disco
Let’s go Frisco
Let’s go blues
Let’s go cruise

Let’s go far
Let’s go near
Let’s go camping
Let’s go chanting

Let’s go lazy
Let’s go boozing
Let’s go crazy
Let’s go cruising

III.

Cruising in the Greater Vehicle/A Jam Session

“Well, goddamnit, Lawson! Whyn’t you play in key and keep to the
rhythm? First you say you wanna go back to Fresno, back to the fish store
and Kamaboko Gardens on the West Side, and then you say, forget it, I
take it back, let’s go to the Sacto Bon-Odori instead.”

“Yeah. And this ain’t even shoyu season yet, chump!”

“Awww, hell. What’s wrong with you two? Can’t you improvise? You
know, I’m just laying down a bass, man. Just a rhythm, a scale,
something to jam on, something to change, find our range, something to
get us going. Once we get started, we can work our way around to Weed,
put on some tire chains, or break down in Selma, refuse to buy grapes,
raisins, or Gallo, do a pit-stop at a Sacto sporting goods, pick up some air
mattresses shaped like pearl-diving women, and float all day downriver to
the deltas, sipping Cokes and saké in the summer heat.”

“Shit. Whyn’t you just solo and forget the rest of us? You start chanting
and pretty soon we’re hearing the entire Lotus Sutra.”

“You two Buddhaheads just a pair of one-eyed Japs with dishpan hands
and deadpan minds, man. This is the Champ Chonk talking, and we’re
playing Chinese anaconda. Eight-card, no-peek pak-kai, roll your own,
hi-lo, three for sweep, four for hot-sour soup stud, and neither of you’s
put down your ante yet. So shit or get off the shu-mai, fellas.”

“Calm down and watch the road, Alan.”

“Who’s driving this heap, anyway?”

“I thought you were.”

“I thought Lawson was.”

“Don’t worry. This is a dodo-driven, autopiloted, cruise-controlled, Triple-
A-mapped, Flying-A-gassed, dual-overhead-cam, Super-Sofistifunktified,
Frijole Guacamole, Gardena Guahuanco, Chonk Chalupa Cruiser with
Buddha Bandit Bumpers, Jack!”

“Where we going, Alan?”

“Where do you think? We’re going to Paradise.”

© Garrett Hongo
Complete poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.

[One of my favorite poems from last week’s The Wind Shifts reading–full report can be found at my guest post at Letras Latinas–was Adelia Najarro’s exploration of San Francisco. SF is a gorgeous, complicated city that even after three years of living here still makes me gasp and pause at its beauty (a recent visit to a friend’s home in the Sunset District with a view of Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach and the sun setting down over the Pacific had me feeling like a five year old looking at a ferris wheel for the first time) while still befuddling me over its contradictions (the number of homeless out in the streets still wigs me out and the Mission blends from hipster glory to ole skool fam real quicks). I’ve also been lucky enough to visit parts of the city that don’t make it to most tourist maps, the spaces in-between destinations that way too many folks gloss over. Najarro’s poem brings me into those places and takes the time to look around and enjoy the view. It’s a call to take pause in the hectic city that I’ll be thinking about more the next time I’m rushing around.]

San Francisco

My great-grandmother taught my mother to read using chalk
and a black slate in León where adobe brick
buildings are white-washed Spaniards

and history. We brought with us red and blue macaws, panthers,
and crocodiles. Tooling up and down
Dolores Street hills, my Papi rode

a bicycle delivering Lela’s nacatamales. Back and forth
from a clock tower at the end of Market Street,
a renovated 1919 streetcar,

transplanted from Milan, works tourist dollars. Advertisements
from the late sixties posted behind
True View Plexi-glass. I can’t read a word

of the European Italian glitz, deep blue of the Mediterranean
and a Coca-Cola, but there is a warm blanket
on a wooden bench and a leather

hand hook. Above a Cuban restaurant, where waiters serve
black bean hummus and chocolate croissants,
hangs the gay pride flag alongside

a Direct TV satellite dish. Gabby walks to school, Pokémon
cards in his pocket. Sanchez Street. I work
in the kitchen with my Lela. Mariposa Avenue,

Valencia Street, Camino Real, are added to masa. Homemade
tortillas puff into sweetness. I’m not
one third Irish, one half German

and two parts English with a little Cherokee thrown in,
but last night I couldn’t translate the word “hinge”
on every door that opens and closes

to clouds beyond four walls. An old lady, perhaps Cambodian,
Vietnamese, Korean, something of her own,
hurries off the 31 Stockton while

my Tía Teresa double parks in front of the mercados on 24th street
para los quesos y los chiles in the backroom. One
whiff and the world is not so small.

© Adelia Najarro