Inge
( To the Spirit of San Francisco )
In the earliest hours, when no new mother
was wheeled into the ward,
was your spirit as still?
That heft black woman
whom you would have stay the weekend
with your family --
with your daughter and her daughter:
a strong, warm shoulder
for your nodding head.
Is this why the blacks in the kitchen
accepted my love
for " the German grandmother, "
daughter of a Polish father,
and of a German mother,
-- " dead by '43, " you said --
an alumna of an Adolph Hitler school?
( Did they believe
that you ran away and were brought back?
Might they have known the way
of one who flees any master of souls
...Nazis...( nuns? )...your husband...( me? )...)?
When once you had a boyfriend 24 1/2 years
younger, surely, he was younger than me?
I was " too complicated for you;
would I have been then?
Did I ever know you?
Only in those silent, late evenings,
or those mornings when
I would walk you to your car,
my arm about you, could we talk.
Ten years have passed since I last saw you.
That World War II novel I was writing
is many times rewritten
and sleeps in my drawer.
Your " socialist security guard, "
now in far-off Korea
with his Korean friends
defends his imperialist country's
wait for Jong-Il's fall.
In the city I once hated,
that of my birth,
I fell in love
with, "...the tall woman/
the elegant woman/
bursting pale and crimson/
the brunette/
weeping like a flower, "
just over half my age,
from whom I got only my first verse.
Only in you have I caught the eyes
of that suffering goddess of freedom
who is for me alone what is glorious in youth.
May your ageless beauty
one day model the City a proper greeting
for our bay's each new ship of fugitives.
May its name be Liberty! ( Not Alcatraz1 )