San Francisco Gallery

Whence in affairs of passage

A father’s exemplary words

Resound from their brick fortress

Like a tin drum tapping

The command of respect

As no guilt intrudes

  save when tiny voices so rare

  and ancient harp-strings murmur

Child he wanders

Through streets of

San Francisco shopping

  for jew-els

The old black woman   (is seen)

The MOMENT is locked

In two dimension

Twelve by fourteen

The year of sixty-eight

                  Shriveled body writhing

                  In tortured arthritic pain

                  She lies with eyes bared wide

                  On her back in the grimy

                  Disheveled bed walls of

                  Broken paper boxes teeth

                  Gritted finger gnarled

                  Gripping her private

                  Shadow world through

                  Mordant liquor of tears

                  Inky dream pools flooded

                  By strange yellow lights

                  Which dizzily conquer

                  The Carolina sky the

                  Crucifying gravity the

                  Forced breathing of a

                  Maimed boar the sun

                  Smothering her soiled

                  Cardboard soul

Lady at desk

He ask

She say

“it’s sold

At

$7000.00″

The elevator slams open

And child he spills out

The steel & smoked-glass

Door into crowded down-

Town sidewalks filled

With pretty Mexican schoolgirls,

Crisp, white shirts, red plaid skirts,

Dark, daring eyes, parochial laughter

The festive intimacy of

Gingerbread houses and

Posh shops which link arms

And line the roller-coaster

Streets crisscrossing down

To the chilling bay waters

Below the vigilant gulls

Below the rusty iron bridge

                  Which conceals

                  Its cryptic teachings

                  ‘Neath shrouded white blankets

                                                  of mountain fog

Wispfully curling through the town

Like an arm

To caress its Chosen

Lull them to the sublime

Lassitude of death

Breathing somber whispers of

Release the nocturnal chariot

And ebony stallions maunder down,

The invincible silent hoof-beats, down

The subterranean shadow world, down

Through layers of hypnotic harmonic drone

Infinite chorus of Orpheus

The soul is saturated in baptism

Tiny livid eyes kissed by the

Seething red mouth of the silver

Branding iron transfigured ordination

Casting a lambent sheen over

Slow hollow drips of

Inky dream-pools which echo

Through the cavernous throat

Hollow sounds and strange yellow lights

                 Envisage divinity

And beckon her soul

To embrace and dance

The eternal dance of

The forbidden sight

The fog burns out

And the sun gleams

Off the afternoon traffic shoes leather coats Japanese shoppers

cable cars sweat-shirted homosexuals Chinese merchants restaurants

roses camera shops crab sandwiches billboards the bank of America

gold Porsches and businessmen purged of pain and guilt and child

with tears and artists and patrons and the sale of pain and the

price of seven thousand American dollars and forever preserved

behind virgin sheet glass in its gilded frame roaring in silence

the demonic chants of its infinite chorus

Diane Arbus, a photographer

Took a photograph of an old

Black woman in rural South Carolina

In summer, 1968.

It appeared in a San Francisco exhibition

In autumn, 1980.

In 1971, Diane Arbus took

Her own life.