·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Wall Blanket, Bartlett Street between 21st & 22nd Streets, San Francisco, 2008

I am not sure - over these past several years - why my eye is drawn to ‘homeless’ blankets - particularly around Dolores Park and my local Mission Neighborhood in San Francisco. Maybe it’s the combination of shapes, the colors, and the particular circumstance in which I find the blankets - occupied or either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Frankly, I find the shapes quite human - as simple as that. It’s as if any particular blanket gives a short hand history into the life and character of its current or most recent owner. But, it’s more than a pedestrian voyeurism. In the case of this blanket, who is or was the owner, he or she who has the eye for such an attractive color and pattern, and who so carefully ties up the fabric and braces it against the wall? Is it an act of ’sculptural art’ - for the public, you and me, to enjoy? Indeed the figure appears as if is an over-sized Japanese doll, an orphan carefully abandoned. Or, more profoundly, does she appear more similar to a solitary, Japanese woman in an 19th century etching, where the figure - arm, shoulders, torso and waist leaning into the mottled gray wall - evokes a disappointed lover confronting the totality of her state of rejection? And, even if we accept any of these ‘negative’ interpretations of the figure’s circumstance, as a viewer, how are we supposed to also accept the sensuality of shapes evoked within the blanket’s birds and leaves, its curves and internal turns? Aren’t we hit with a paradox? One view luring out a patronizing compassion for ‘the subject’, while the other compels a desire to embrace, in a sense, to ’seduce’ or otherwise explore and - as if an old-fashioned imperialist - exploit ‘the oriental object.’

There is no answer, really! Sometimes the beautiful and peculiar are quite enough without all this speculation. Don’t you think? To take in, to visually partner with the blanket without entertaining ‘a single thought’ as impossible as that may seem.

*****

Cumberland Steps, below Sanchez Street, San Francisco, 2008

We rise & fall to grieve & dream.
Who is this shrouded figure? Why does the eye engage so quickly?
Solid & fluid. Fluid & solid.
Head tilted, hands clasped over the knees:
Dream ladder or, in this case, a stairway. As if this one had,
at some point, risen to be received somewhere up there
only to become faint of heart, or, by some force, rejected.
It’s impossible to know the actual cause of sorrow. Maybe
a field of dreams - so desired and wanted - was not such,
but a baleful place, a land of defeated souls offering nothing
but a horrifying loss of illusions. Who knows?
This icon - as so the figure appears - articulates not a word. Surely,
however, a sign of warning: loss is a permeable, fluid thing,
a constant offering, no matter how entrancing &/or beautiful,
its visible (here) manifestation.

*****

Blanket, 18th Street, Dolores Park, San Francisco, 2008

Dream Knots. A knotted night, no doubt. The blanket knotted,
the tree knotted. We know this person. He or she never
quite wakes up.
A body in which each daylight move is a series of cramped nodules.
Nothing is fluid. Everything - large to small - is a hard lump. In fact,
we are known to call this person a lump. No,
more than a lump. Indeed, a multiple-lump.
The dream is to open each nodule with a sharp knife.
A careful slash! To pour the body forth in green vine and branch.
To sooth the unborn worlds of the living.
Again & again, to say good-bye to each nodule,
each, ever so hardy, knotted lump.

*

Blanket above Trolley Tracks, Dolores Park, San Francisco, 2008

Someone got up this morning - a light or dark-eyed stranger - and left
a luminous trace. What was so dark, goes light: white gentle waters
in shallow furrows, eddies and ebbs. Who got carried here -
not far above the trolley tracks - through what channels of the night?

The eye witnesses & does not declare to know, only, if so moved, to ask.

***

Blankets, edge of walkway, Dolores Park, San Francisco, 2007

Royalty of a sort, purity of another, abandoned, tucked together:
Exile provides it’s own punctuation marks. No, it is not nostalgia
for a prior country, not an altar piece where the local Monks, through careful discipline
and execution provide the presence of a Holy Other.
Those were cloths of a different, now lost time. In Exile the eye is
a rag picker, puts things together, one at a time. This one here,
that one there; a good combination breeds a certain, momentary bliss.
In the open, outside the once well-made Temple, today, wandering,
these (the tuck, is it care?) two colors (maroon and white)
this punctuation, this ancient grammar (construct) that curious intersection where
a sentence becomes sentient.

Yesterday, Saturday, was Small Press Traffic’s Tribute to Beverly Dahlen, a lovely event in which I and several other poets presented various kinds of praise for her work. She followed our ‘footsteps’ with a reading of works, most of which had never been published in book form. The haptic pen was at work most of the afternoon - this piece is in direct response to Bev’s reading.

Fanny Howe appeared twice this past week for the San Francisco State Poetry Center. On Thursday, December 4, she gave a reading from several of her volumes and some new work at the main campus. On Saturday evening she delivered the George Oppen Memorial lecture at the Unitarian Center at Geary and Franklin Streets in the City. I am not about to paraphrase the depth and intent of each occasion. However, I will say that she and I are born within a year of each other, 1940 and 1941, she on the East Coast and I on the West. We share in common the experience of being born at the onset of World War II during which we our early childhoods were both embraced by the war hysteria and dread that informed domestic family life, particularly those living within the vulnerable cities of either Coast combined while our fathers and/or uncles that enlisted to fight either the Germans and Italians in Europe and/or Northern Africa, of the Japanese in the South Pacific. As such young children it was to live in a space of darkness punctuated by occasional photographs and unspoken fears. (Unlike, say, someone like Tom Raworth where the bombings over England were quite real - both in the onslaught and the visibility of the destruction.)

Fanny’s George Oppen Memorial lecture - taking a view into the history of the War’s impact - religious and philosophical - sought to put a name on that invisible, undefinable childhood space in which the family became divided and, in her case, the connection across the Atlantic to and with the world of Europe was so damaged. That paraphrase probably makes it too simple. In concrete terms, she used the occasion of the lecture to explore the relationship of the work of Simon Weil (essayist and keeper of journals) with George Oppen (poet and keeper of journals.) Imagining both figures almost as ships passing in the night, Simone Weil - a participant in the French resistance - escaped the Nazis via Marseille in 1941, only to return to resume the fight in England, where she died from TB in 1943. Oppen enlisted and in 1943 arrived to fight in Europe also through the port of Marseille .

Fanny’s lecture, essentially, tackled the similarity of issues faced by both Oppen - in many respects a secular Jew, but in no way ignorant of the teachings - and Weil, the Catholic, who was a constant critic of the Church, and grounded her Catholicism in her studies of the sacred traditions, particularly Hindu, of India. From an early age (12?) she began to have a working knowledge of Sanskrit. Without a transcript I am not about to accurately trace the connections Fanny makes between the kinds of consciousness that evolve and manifest in the work of both writers. In common, the war tests their in faith human kind is tested and worn down, if not practically obliterated, during which their perceptions and consciousness of the world are ground down to become as sharply refined as though perceived through a perfect glass lense, albeit, as Oppen puts it, as though he had passed through the proverbial eye of the needle.

From the point of view of drawing - making these haptics - it was delightful to let the pen, so to speak, partner with the wandering, exploratory thread of her Fanny’s voice. (As Bob Grenier, also born as myself in 1941, told me later, she could have read from the phone book and he would have still listened). She indeed permits the work - both the poetry and in her essay - to create a tonal space that, particularly in the case of the lecture, creates a third player in which we are not only focused on the interplay between Oppen and Weil, but given an infusion and drawn into Fanny’s own consciousness and presence in the world.