San Francisco mist in morning
over the trees in Golden Gate park
carries over in mourning
to light the Pacific’s dark.
The pyramid sways in sunshine
gray afternoons in Chinatown
little boys and girls walking with old women--
eyes slanted and staring at the sun--
who buy flowers and shark fins
where the world ends and time begins
all inside a crisp deli bag
and the silence of the stray Coca Cola can
on the seagull deck of Pier 39
makes me think about the way leaves blush
in San Francisco autumn,
the emptiness dams inside
as soon as I depart the deck
and swim to the shores of Alcatraz
where there is no longer mist.
The cable cars climb up the hills
the chilly Pacific splitting across the rocks
Lombard, Coit Tower, Embarcadero, the
homeless tapping in the streets with a boombox
and a family stops, stares and tosses a quarter.
Soon the hat jingles with sound
as the man rises and slips to his house
the home that each one of us has always found
veiled in the San Francisco mist.
