 Oh my God, what does it go like this? OK. Let's just stand over there, Nate. OK. OK. Just for you, blues are singing. Just for birds are blue. Sky is singing. Just for geese us snare. It's really, really nice to be here tonight, and I want to thank Kevin, who did an incredible job of updating things really, really quickly. Once now, Nona asked me to come read with her. And it's such a treat for me to read with Nona, who I adore. And if you haven't read her book, do not leave without it. Just don't leave without it. It's so good. So I've been working on a bunch of, hmm, but I don't know what they are. Are they poems? Are they monologues? Are they somewhere in between? We don't know. They're just things about San Francisco. And that's what I'm going to read from tonight. This is a ghost story. Two mugs of coffee on a Formica table, a one-block alley with its own police code. Midnight, a set of weary footsteps. A small blue car goes missing. On the corner, an upstairs dance floor filled with dikes is swallowed by the sky or by the sea, a flying dream. A bar loses its flag and its gold shimmer curtains. Another loses all its women. A bookstore, a cafe, a day spa. Xerox posters appear on telephone polls. Last scene, call if, missing. Queers, dikes, drag queens and trans folks. At 3 AM on 21st Street, the sound of showers and moaning men hovers the sidewalk. A woman in the back of a store puts away her beans best in the city. Her rice and tortillas, metal cash box, and locks the front door for the last time. A guidebook goes out of print. Photographs and newspaper clippings whisper secrets inside white cardboard boxes on black metal shelves. Thursday, a five-alarm flyer. Another Saturday, a one-alarm Monday, then a tent, two cars, a plywood box home. Turn a corner or stop to tie shoelaces, faces, float into peripheral view. Some of them are singing show tunes. Some of them are speaking Spanish. Some of them just stare and stare and stare. The small blue car wanders south. But it's an odd thing there and there. How's that? The first time I heard Sylvester's sooner or later was on vinyl, not ironic vinyl or collector vinyl, but original vinyl bought from a record store. It was New Year's Eve, 1986, 1987, moments after midnight when Weissman dropped the needle of his turntable onto the third track, Flipside, the penultimate track, a late 80s electronic dance beat kicking in, and the room hardwood floors off the panhandle, erupting with gay men dancing, then up a notch as Sylvester's voice soared in, and the gospel-tinged backup singers started taking us to church. Sooner or later, I'll be loving you. I was dancing with Johnno, who always looked stoned, and maybe was, who always looked like he'd just come from the best fuck of his life, and maybe had. I'm searching for a one-way ticket to paradise sooner or later. This was before Sylvester would get sick and die, before Johnno followed, before and during. Now, I play the song for my students, a writing exercise, asking them to imagine some scene triggered by that beat, by that voice. Imagine a time before any of them were born. They have no idea who Sylvester was, and they rarely ask. No idea that every gay man who met Johnno knew they'd found a reason to stomp their feet, shout out a hallelujah, though few of us believed in God not then. Maybe the universe, maybe, but mostly in each other. No idea, and how could they, that my friends, and I danced one dark New Year's Eve at the start of so many more dark New Years, dance to this song that Weissman picked to play at the stroke of midnight, which is why I'm playing it for them this fall afternoon. Skip that one, skip that one. So I live in the Mission again. I lived in the Mission in the late 80s with my friend Ann. And I have moved back. I lived very close to 16th in Mission, which surprisingly in the last 30 years hasn't really changed that much. Unlike other parts of the city, it's still its own kind of, well, it's just its own thing. It's very, very particular. This was, this often happens on Saturday. This is called Blood Moon. Christians screaming on 16th and Mission, Bibles jabbed the air as hundreds of pigeons circle land, peck the plaza, circle land, perch, phone wire. It's Spanish on the portable loudspeaker. I catch a few hallelujahs, a few Jesus Teamos, plus the pissed off tone on this pissed on corner. The junkies, the hipsters, the guys selling late nights, late night, late night. Grocery shoppers, bus catchers, drunks with boom boxes. Don't pay any attention. Are those pigeons circling, circling, circling? Then a boy at the mic, somewhere in his 20s, his warnings in English. Tonight there's a blood moon, earthquakes coming soon. Don't follow the pope, the presidents, the antichrists. Jesus, Jesus es Dios, trust in the blood of our Savior Jesus. Hallelujah, hallelujah, circling, circling, circling. An REM song hums my head. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. And I do. If Old Testament prophecies pretend the end, I don't believe it's tonight. Those pigeons, though, circling, circling, circling. Did the boy wake up with the dead prophet's words humming his head? Did his certainty ever waver as he pressed his shirt, knotted his tie? His words pause. His Bible lifts the air. Then the mic rises. The pigeons, they keep circling, circling, circling. OK, yeah, good. I have always written public transportation in San Francisco. And I'm Muny Bart, all of it, Caltrain. But I stopped driving about nine years ago. And a sort of more conscious choice to stop driving, because I just sort of hate driving. So I just thought I'm not going to drive anymore. So some of these poems are about writing various parts of public transportation. This is one of them. It's called An Arrow. The Muny car smells like a long-closed attic in an abandoned house on the shore of a northern lake. A man in a ear flap hat quick draws three-pulse pieces of paper from the holster of his coat pocket, starts writing furiously, racing some internal adjudicator about to call time. Pencil down, please. Last-minute meeting notes? Diagrams for military maneuvers? He backhands the pages flat across his lap, cross-wood puzzles, Xeroxed, nine down, solved, backhand, seven across, backhand, backhand. Why the rush down on the cross? At Powell, shoppers crowd the platform to the car, a late arrival, body slams the doors. The doors shriek back. I'm shoved up against a man. His neck, river curve, waterfall. I fight the urge to lick, try to imagine the surface. Sidewalk, palm tree, postal carriers. I still want a lick. I try to take a deep, long breath. Yesterday, in the dusk sky, a black cloud formed an arrow pointing down the horizon line. You are here. This is just a couple more. The other thing that I do a lot in San Francisco is walk. I believe that a city is not really a city, unless it's a city that you can walk in. So that's just, and so there's a set of poems about walking. This is called Summer Solstice. I walk home from yoga, mat rolled under my arm. I can feel the space in my spine, my feet firm on the ground. Between Dolores and Guerrero, a steep grade down, my gaze is lowered, scanning three, four feet ahead. That's when I see it, stenciled on the sidewalk in black. I wish you missed me. I stop, reread the sentence. Notice the letters are faded, fading. Oh, this isn't new. Who left this message? Why this block? How long after their last conversation before the stencil, the spray paint, before and after, I wish you missed me? Small space in my spine disappears. I look at the apartments both sides of the street. Where's the mist? Have you seen your wish? You can still see that. It's actually on both sides of the street. It's gorgeous. It's called Protest Day. This was when the Patriot Prayer group came to San Francisco. I actually didn't go to the protest, but I did go outside twice. I don't know if that counts, anyways. But I had two very different experiences of San Francisco, as you can see. This is thousands of March Against Right Wing rally in San Francisco. Patriot Prayer flees to Pacifica. That was August 26, 2007, protest day one. And I walk outside. The sun and the car blare. Don't worry about a thing. Sound tracking the day. Someone's left a white ceramic poodle on the corner, perky, in a triangle of shade. And oh, silly Nazis. Don't you know this is the 50th anniversary of love? And the leaves fall, which means it's almost summer in San Francisco. Two. And I walk outside. The wind and a man worry the concrete planters. Frantic, mumbling, white plastic bags. A poodle has run off. A woman sweeps the curb with a takeaway fork. And oh, oh, another man hunched over an open ziplock, shoots up his nostril, and the light early fades, which means it's almost summer in San Francisco. And this is the last thing I'm going to read. I had the supreme pleasure of spending about a year working on a, I don't know what to call it. We call it an experimental dance theater performance piece, which sounds really pretentious. But I was working with three choreographers, and we did this show for two days for free right after the election at the Old First Presbyterian Church, just sort of a gift out into the world. And this is from that. So this was actually kind of a monologue. It's only a bit of a surprise. I'm used to it by now. I think we all are. You know, walking down a street that you used to know and finding out that it's changed to the point where you don't know, it happened yesterday. I'm walking. Coffee shop, artisanal food court, pharmacy, real estate office, another pharmacy, more coffee, more real estate, pharmacy, pharmacy, pharmacy. Huh, one on the corner, one across the street, one in the middle of the block, one corner to corner. One's getting built. One's just opened, I think. One's been opened, that I know. And then before that, so ugly, all of them, the fluorescent aisles of hair care, teeth care, paper products, the pegboard window displays, the repeated oversized logos, too many colors in too small a space behind those hissing, automatic doors. Why are there so many pharmacies on this street? And why are they also ugly? Why an ugly kind of call and response as I walk? Why ugly, why ugly, why ugly? Somehow I've gotten myself into the middle of the street. It's a busy street with two lines both ways. I'm starting to turn around, sort of circumnavigating the median strip. Now it looks like it's nothing but pharmacies, pharmacy, pharmacy, pharmacy. Why ugly, why ugly, why ugly? Then boom, an explosion. I stop, turn towards the sound, one of the pharmacies is on fire. Then boom, another pharmacy's on fire. I look back, the first one is getting worse, smokes and sparks, huge flames, then boom, boom, boom, third, fourth, fifth pharmacy. Did I make this happen? Did I start some sort of spell? Oh, how could I do that? I looked down the street one way, boom, after boom, after boom. I looked down the street the other way, same thing. I've stopped spinning, I've stopped screaming and I'm staring at the sky. I'll reds and oranges and umbers. Then I start to see these small flying dots and the dots flying start dropping onto the street, onto the median strip, onto the cars parked on the side, onto me. It's pills. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pills, pills popping out of their child-proof bottles, pills piling up ankle-deep, a deluge, a flood, I'm going to be submerged. Then I realize that some of those pills are my pills, aren't they? Some of them are probably your pills, aren't they? The pills that keep me level, the pills that keep me asleep, the pills that submerge the virus, the heart pills, the head pills, the neck and hip pills, they're all flying the air, frying the air. What am I gonna do without my pills? What are you gonna do without your pills? What are we gonna do? Thank you. I, how lucky am I to get to hang out with that guy? I'm gonna read some, what some people might call chapters. I'm gonna call them, I think the book is the collage. They call it a novel. It is a novel of sorts and it's done in pieces and like a collage or a song cycle. I'm gonna start with a piece called The Dog, The Dog. Every day during the summer at about three o'clock, a shadow shaped like a dog appeared on my writing table. It was a small dog. I could see the head, the two pointed ears, the fluffy tail. The dog sat across from me at the far end of the table and then slowly approached until it disappeared at six o'clock. I couldn't locate where the dog came from. It seemed disconnected from the dark rooming house across the alley from anything and all the inhabitants bleak dusty windows. I know this lack of source makes the dog unreal but the dog was as true and constant as anything else in my apartment. I waited for the dog to arrive and when it did I would sit working on my thesis with the dog for company. But some days the dog felt like a bad omen, a nomadic wraith and on those days I felt as if my apartment had somehow detached from the center of things and were floating somewhere to the left of anything that mattered. I suppose I could have experienced those days as freedom but I didn't. Other things appeared in that apartment over the alley. Once returning from work I found a piece of paper near an open window with a handwritten verse on it. The merrier we be, the sunnier we see and blinded by the light becomes a melody. The writer had scratched out melody and written tragedy. Another time when cleaning I found a multicolored rubber ball under the couch. A week later a child's sock though there were no children in the building or in the rooming house next door. In fact I don't remember seeing a single child the three years I lived there. The sock was lime green with the picture of a horse face over the toe. If you put your hand inside the horse's face bloomed in three dimensions and stared at you under droopy lashes. Another time near the end of my stay the sudden smell of lilacs hit me as I walked through the door again with no apparent source. Some days the dog appeared to be sitting up alert other days the dog's head hung low still other days the dog seemed to be sleeping its head resting on its small paws. One day the dog appeared with only one ear. I didn't notice the missing ear immediately it was only when I looked up a third time during the middle of a long and arduous thought that I saw the one ear clearly sticking up and the other ear gone. The next day half of its tail was missing leaving a fluffy stump. The next day it seemed to be missing a paw. That night in my bed I began to imagine the dog outside my apartment roaming the streets and scavenging sleeping in doorways or maybe in alleys. I lay awake worrying about the dog but of course there was nothing I could do and I knew the dog wasn't real and that there were real dogs out there getting hurt and I should worry about them. Nonetheless I worried about my shadow dog. I woke in the morning late took a shower and read another book. At one o'clock I sat at my table and tried to write but I couldn't concentrate. I began instead to think about the dog. I had read an article about dog fighting in the city about gambling rings and people who stole dogs off the street and out of cars to use for these fights. I imagined a basement with concrete floors and oil stains and a walled arena surrounded with chairs. The men in t-shirts smoking and drinking whiskey and I imagined my little shadow dog in a cage in the corner sitting quietly shaking. That's where I had to stop. It was too sad. I had imagined the dog in the worst situation but I could just as easily have imagined it roaming through the park sniffing eucalyptus leaves sleeping under the trees and stars. At three o'clock the dog appeared with one ear, half a fluffy tail, all four paws intact and a shorter snout. But it looked content. It's head tilted slightly to one side. I was happy to see it. I said hello and then I went back to work. Now the apartment was brighter. There was a glow in my small room as there always was when the dog appeared. Every time I looked up the little dog was there in its own way steadfast. Just as the air began to thicken and prepare for dusk the dog vanished and I wondered what shape it would be in the next day and what it would be missing or if it would appear at all. What kind of suffering are we off to? What kind of joy? A hat shaped like a dog that looked like a cat. One morning on my walk to work down Market Street I met a friend who also was walking to work. He had been a friend of Michelle's mostly but after her death for a short while he had become my friend. We ate dinner together several times at my favorite taqueria. The last time he had leaned forward in his chair and reached over his burrito to hold my hand. I couldn't look at him while he held my hand. Instead I looked at his plaid shirt sleeve or rather at the yellow threads which seemed to be unraveling. The atmosphere was very quiet in this particular taqueria but the workers, three men behind a glass counter were loud or at least two of them were. Often these two men when they saw me would meow because one winter when Michelle was still alive I had worn a hat shaped like a dog that looked to them like a cat. That day on the street my friend was not wearing his plaid shirt. In fact he was not wearing anything I recognized from the past when he and Michelle and sometimes the three of us used to sit in cafes and drink things or walk around the Castro or when I'd had dinner with him alone those few times over a year ago. He was wearing a gray blue suit and a white button down shirt and shiny black shoes. His hair was shorter and his eyes were brown. Did you always have brown eyes? I asked. He said that his eyes had been hazel most of his life but they had gotten darker suddenly and that the same thing had happened to his father at the same age which was 32. When my friend had gone in recently to renew his driver's license he put down that his eyes were hazel but the man behind the counter said, your eyes are brown. My friend said he had been waiting for his eyes to change color and so he had taken a photograph of himself every day for the past year. He carried these in his briefcase. You can see them changing, he said. And as we stood on the sidewalk flipping through all those photos I could. He also said that as his eyes changed he stopped feeling like the same person. He no longer for example felt like a man who would wear tattered flannel shirts or a man with scruffy hair hanging over his neck. He was single when I knew him and now he was married and his wife was pregnant. His story reminded me of the mole on my forehead about two weeks after the funeral I went into the bathroom and turned on the light but the face in front of me looked different from the one I had remembered. I didn't recognize the shape or the color, the hue. The dark mole above my left eyebrow which had been there since childhood was gone. My face could just as easily have been someone else's and somehow this new face allowed me to go on. I'm happy for you, I finally said to my friend and I reached out and held his hand. I had expected his skin now to be smoother but it felt as rough as it had before when we sat in the taqueria. That night on my walk home from work the sidewalks were empty and the air had become foggy. Ahead of me three trees I hadn't noticed before hung over the walkway, their thick curtain of slivery vines, their leaves golden. They were whispering something I could almost hear. I have a animal thing going on tonight. The horse. Has anybody here ever had a horse? You have? Francis, you've had a horse. Cassie, you've had a horse, that's right. You have a horse. When I was a kid I had a friend who lived across the field from us. I grew up in rural Minnesota. She lived across the field and she had this sort of muddy, raggedy old buckskin colored horse and she said, whenever I wanted to, I could ride it. And so I would trek over there, bike over there, not knowing anything, not knowing how to put anything on, not knowing a single thing or hardly anything. I somehow got the bridal on but I, you know, I didn't get a saddle on it. So I just jumped on that horse and rode through town, this small town across the railroad tracks and in front of the houses where I grew up and then the horse ripped out. I mean, it just ripped off with me across this old empty field that used to be a World War II. It was across from the country houses that I grew up in this neighborhood with a few houses out in the country outside of town. And my mother was looking out the window and all she saw was this 13 year old daughter wearing one of those red tube top halter tops that we wore, you know, those things that were barely anything in these little hot pants, you know, hanging with her long blonde hair. For dear life, for dear life, I survived a lot but of all the things I've survived in the physical world, it's nothing like what I've survived in the literary world, the horse. One, every day for two years, I sat on the couch reading stories from my thesis, which was about animals or rather about animals in place and contemporary literature. I was especially curious about the literary portrayal of North American farm animals. In one story, three days by Samantha Hunt, Beatrice and her younger brother decide to ride their old farm horse, Humbletonian, to the new mall complex a mile down the highway. They are drunk and it is freezing. The story mentions this several times. Beatrice and Clem saddle the horse, Humbletonian, and clomp off down the road uneventfully. They listen to the click of Humbletonian's hooves and the rush of the horse's warm pulse. When they reach the middle land mall, they tie the horse to a corral for carts outside Walmart and then they go inside. But when they return, Humbletonian is gone. They search and search and then a page later behind Walmart, they discover at least 20 bulldozers and a gigantic hole. It is tremendous, far larger than a football field and it is filled with water. As soon as I read the sentence about the hole of water, I knew the horse was going to drown. I set the story down and said out loud, oh no, the horse is going to drown. My chest tightened and I felt dread and then an anticipatory sadness and then dread again, though I can see now that my anxiety had begun paragraphs before, probably in the first paragraph where the protagonist is walking in darkness down the highway and passes a bloated dead raccoon. When I set the story down, the first thing I did was look at the back of my hand. I looked at my hand with its blue veins and geography of lines that I had always liked. As I've grown older, the veins and tendons have become more pronounced like mountain ridges on a topographical map. After I looked at my hand and went into the bathroom and cleaned the sink and then I cleaned the bathroom floor with a washcloth. I thought about cleaning under the tub. In fact, I did not clean under that tub until I moved out two years later. And then I was surprised that although the floor was dusty, it really was not that dirty. After I cleaned the bathroom, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't want to clean anymore and I didn't want to talk on the phone and I didn't want to go outside. And even though I knew the horse was going to drown, I began to feel hopeful that somehow the story would veer in another direction and the brother and sister would save the horse or the horse would save itself. I picked up the story again. Humbletonian has climbed down into the pit and is walking across the surface of the ice that has formed there. The storyteller speculates that one of the bulldozers broke a water pipe while digging. There is a lot of water here, a reservoir's worth of drinking water or Beatrice hopes not frozen sewage. Humbletonian is walking across the ice bending every now and again to lick the surface, gross. In the next paragraphs we read about the silver beauty of the horse and the gorgeous ice and dirt and the lovely darkness, thick like felt. And in the final sentence of those paragraphs, a jealous hole cracks open and swallows the back end of Humbletonian. She tries to clear the water to get a hoof back on the solid ice but each clop of her front hooves shatters what she's grabbed and pulls it under with her. The reader along with the sister and the brother who are standing helplessly on the rim of the ice watched the horse thrash in the cold water and then the horse starts giving up. She falls still. Beatrice can see a lot of white in the horse's eye as though it had been pried open. It blinks dry air once more for the last time. Humbletonian's head goes under and all Beatrice can see are her four legs above the barrier of the ice. Her legs kick emptying what's inside them. It's a gruesome convulsion. I sat on the couch. I could not even look at the back of my hand. Two, after this I walked into the bathroom again but then I just stood there. I couldn't remember what I was going to do. I could see the horse thrashing through the ice and the water closing over its eyes which had gone white. I could feel the constriction of sadness across my chest and in my mind. I played the scene again and again thinking I would get used to the outcome or eventually would be able to see the horse more objectively as a metaphor or symbol but each time I felt the pang of unfairness and each time I felt the fear of the animal and the stupidity of the sister and brother. They were drunk, it was freezing. The sister had moved off the farm to a big city a year earlier and it had been her idea to take the horse to the shopping complex probably to prove a point. I went on with my day but after a few hours I began to question the use of reading the story. I questioned the use of fiction in general. What did we gain? I also felt bad about the stories I had glorified in my thesis in which characters die even though they die for a good reason. I thought I did not want to write about those kinds of stories anymore. Instead I would write my own stories about everyday occurrences like people reading things and thinking things and stories in which people and the animals go on for a long time the way many of us do. Three, a few more hours after reading the story I realized that I could stop some of my anxiety by telling myself the event did not happen. I could say this story is not real, this did not happen. Though of course I knew in another part of me that things like that do happen that the story is in fact happening everyday. Four, after I wrote the previous paragraph I thought it should be the end but then I thought this isn't what I came to say either, is it? Five, my friend Chris has a horse with a beautiful white mane and coat with burgundy splotches and he has amber eyes that glow in the darkness of the barn like the eyes of barn owls. Once when I was visiting her in Minnesota she told me that animals do not suffer or feel pain the way humans do and she accused me of over identifying with and even personifying animals. She said this because I had just told her a story about my brother's dog. Two summers ago my brother's nanny left his two year old golden retriever in the back of his SUV after a lake outing. She had, he had, she had unpacked the kids and bags of lake stuff but she forgot about the dog. It was a hot day. And when my brother found his dead dog he discovered that it had chewed off all the door handles. Can you see it gutted? My friend was right about my over identification with animals. It was one of the reasons I was having a hard time writing my thesis but also one of the reasons I had chosen the topic. She was not right about my personifying animals. I do not think animals are humans nor do I want animals to be like humans. What I love about animals is that they are not human but I do feel bad that humans including myself have ruined so many things for animals. Even a cow knows when to stop eating grass from a worn out hill. Six, I ended up going for a walk through the city but I couldn't get the horse off my mind. The white eyeballs, the front hooves in the air crashing down on the ice, the gruesome final convulsion. I couldn't get the idea out of my mind that the sister and brother could have done something to save the horse. I called my friend Chris on my new cell phone and told her the story. And even though she thought I was overreacting she agreed that the horse could possibly have been saved. We talked about the story and about the baby coyote Chris had seen two weeks earlier on a bluff in southeastern Minnesota. Seven, when I am old I will walk and walk through the woods and meadows of North America. I will not bring a camera or notebook only my eyes, my nose, my skin. I will sleep near streams and hike up mountains. The sun will bake my skin brown and my hair white and I will hobble like an old mountain goat. Give me my green, green grass and blue water. Give me my mineral flavored air and rain to wash the dirt off my hooves. On my way home from my walk I lay on a hill in a park and stared at the tops of eucalyptus, giant sequoia, redwood, madrone. I listened to the earth's dense whisper and the air's silence. All the birds were cooing, were cawing. A dragonfly landed in the crease of my neck. Eight, as soon as Beatrice sees Humboldt Tony and on the ice she runs into the store. Everything is happening in slow motion but she keeps on going. She rallies the Walmart workers in their blue aprons that say, Walmart, how can I help you? Someone from Yard and Garden grabs a rope and someone in the candy department grabs a caramel apple and at least 20 Walmart workers follow Beatrice out the back door. The cashier from Register Three knows a lot about ropes and horses and she instructs the sister and brother to say encouraging things while holding out the apple. Listen to me, Humboldt Tony and Beatrice says. We're going to get you out. Don't give up, you're just resting for a moment. And that's when the woman tosses the rope over the horse's neck and slips it under her front legs and yells, now! The bulldozer inches forward and all the people line up along the rope and everyone pulls and pulls and pulls and their hearts race and they feel their determination like a beast, like a beast. And together they pull the goddamn horse free. Thank you to Kevin and to the amazing things they do at this library. I don't know some of you thank you. Some of you may know some of the amazing things they do at this library. I mean, libraries used to just be places where you went and got books and now libraries are just hopping. My god, there's events everywhere and workshops and I don't know, I saw something called Mix It Up Downstairs Who Knows What That Is, Kevin.